How to start an online grocery store?

According to the data on status, there is a huge demand and popularity of online grocery stores across the globe now. Even in developing countries, people are going online to buy their home grocery especially due to the Coronavirus. People don’t want to go out instead they want to order online. 

Do you want to start an online grocery store? 

If you have been thinking or dreaming of having your own online grocery store, regardless of your big business or small business or just starting up, we can help you to achieve your dream. There are a lot of eCommerce platforms available to do this. However, Shopify is the best platform to open and run an online grocery store. It is also estimated by the end of 2020 the e-commerce industry will contribute about 15% of the total revenue, which means out of every $7, $1 is consumed on e-commerce.

Let’s have a look at this quick guide on how to run a grocery store online. Once you have built your mind to start an online grocery store. You need to look at the audience, geographic areas, and the demand in the local market. You need to see what people are looking for, what consumers are looking for when they buy online. It is very important to find the target audience for your online grocery store.  

You need to find out the following:

• Who is your target audience? 
• Can you define a particular customer? 
• Do you know where they live? 
• How far do they live from your warehouse? 
• Can you ask them some kind of survey? 
• Can you find out what problem they find online and can use all of them? 

Target market and technology 

When starting a grocery store, you need to spend a good time planning which technology you will be using in a grocery store. If you are not technically sound or you do not want to be involved in the day to day technical aspect of the business, you can hire a Shopify Agency who can build a Shopify store for you. Having a good Shopify agency is very important to build your grocery store online because well-experienced individuals in a Shopify agency will guide you on how to open and run your eCommerce business online. 

Why choose Shopify? 

Shopify is very, very convenient and the right choice to open an online grocery store because it is very user friendly and has many inbuilt functionalities, for example, all of your customer data, product data, categories, images, product prices, inventory control, stock management, invoices, delivery slips, warehousing, fulfillment. Everything is taken care of inside the Shopify platform. You do not need to worry about such things, which means you can focus on running your store online. 

Hire an SEO agency 

In order to make your grocery store online is a success. You must appear in Google search keywords. When a customer searches for some kind of food item, drinks items, or general household items, you should start coming in the Google search which would bring the traffic to your newly opened store. Therefore having a good Google SEO is very important to run your grocery store online. Normally Shopify agencies have people who do Google SEO for their customers. If you are looking to hire us as your Shopify agency, we will take care of everything for you from starting the store, running the store to doing the SEO, and social marketing for you. 

Online grocery stores in the UK 

Online grocery shopping in the UK is the fastest-growing at the moment especially due to the lockdown in these months. There is a huge demand for people ordering things online. With all the major companies now delivering online small players and also new grocery stores have started to come up as well. Therefore buyers have a better choice to find their best grocery store online in the UK. Due to the issues with COVID 19 there is a high demand for online ordering and some of the major supermarkets are not able to cope with the demand, which gives an opportunity for new commerce in the market to fulfill customer demand.  

How to attract and win customers for your grocery store online?

In order to win customer trust and get reliable customers, it’s very important to have a user-friendly grocery store and your grocery store should be easy to navigate. It should be fast loading, the information should be easily available, the product should be in very user-friendly categories and you can also offer some kind of discounts, promo codes and loyalty schemes in order to retain your customers. 

The online grocery store business model

It is very important to understand what and which business model you will be following in order to run your grocery store online. Would you have a warehouse of your own or would you use a drop shipping model where your website will place an order which will go to the supplier and then the supplier will deliver the goods or would you have a brick and mortar physical shop where people can come and pick up the goods? As you begin to explore these questions, your mind will get more clarity on running the business and you will be more confident running your online grocery store. There are many websites which nowadays give the option to have grocery delivered online so you can have a look at that as well. 

Good suppliers. 

Having a good supplier for your grocery store is very important because that will help you to retain the customer in the next order. If your supplier cannot deliver on time or they deliver late, you will be losing your very fast customers. Therefore, you need to consider a few factors like  

• Stock/inventory.
• Can the supplier deliver in a given radius?
• How far the warehouse is from your given radius?

Getting the right technology

In the current day and time, about one-third of online consumers are expected to shop their groceries online, which means for every three customers of one customer is now going online to buy their groceries. This clearly is evidence that technology will take the driver’s seat in to drive this economy forward. Your online store is nothing but a website and a shop, a webshop. Therefore, the technology running behind the website and the webshop needs to be robust, reliable, and up to date technology. If you hire a Shopify agency to build your grocery store online, then your Shopify agency must understand every feature, every requirement of your business, and they must choose the right platform to run your website.

The website and mobile should be super fast on laptops and on mobile. This website should be robust to secure and easy to use for your customers. Choose the right platform. We as a Shopify agency recommend using Shopify as your platform to run your grocery store online.

Why choose Webezy as a Shopify agency? 

Webezy is making Shopify stores for more than five years now. We have all sorts of clients from small startup businesses to big enterprise businesses, Our clients benefit from a vast industry and a diverse industry experience we have in designing various Shopify stores online. When we start working with you, we will make sure that we understand your requirement, your customer base, your products, and there is nothing left in touch while we deliver your online grocery store. 

How long does it take to develop an online grocery store?

Normally in order to develop a grocery store online, you need at least two to three weeks in order to input all the products, categories, collections, and design, a nice looking grocery store website. However, depending on your products and the number of products, this time could be reduced to two weeks, one week, two weeks. Or if you have more than a hundred products, we may take three to four weeks. This really depends. If you like to book a free consultation with one of our project managers, please click here to book an appointment now. 

I hope you will find this guide very useful in order to set up a grocery store online. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We as your Shopify agency can help you to launch your grocery store online.