Description of Idea
Easy Cart is the application responsible for providing the best grocery deals in an easy & stress-free manner. This app will display grocery items on app and deals directly with local vendors, and then provide the buyers best offers and price for the item he/she wants to buy. The grocery gets deliver to your home directly and it allows user to keep track on their monthly grocery expenses. There are several payment options available like credit/debit/cash on delivery etc. This app also analyses customers shopping pattern and uses this data to provide future recommendations and create meaningful reports to draw the insights about product sale & popular brand. These reports can be presented to vendors for providing insights about sales and predictions.
Customer Pain
There could be many possible customer pain points with traditional grocery buying approach. For example-customers wastes a lot of time standing in long checkout queues. Since there are limited number of checkout lanes it becomes congested for customers to stand in queue and go for checkout. Although self-pay option exists in many superstores these days but due to their limited numbers and less user-friendly design makes the overall user experience unpleasant. The other reasons for a bad experience could be product out of stock, parking issues, confusing layout, poor quality products.
As per Consumer Report article (2015), shows the major issues in store grocery shopping experience along with percentage of customers who complaint about it.
Target Audience
Easy Cart has two major customer segments: –
1. Buyers
The buyers will be the people using App for buying grocery online. They will be diverse individuals like tech savy people, students, youngsters, professional and the reasons for buying grocery online are it saves time, fuel, discounts, promos, home delivery etc.
The stats from Statista 2018 illustrates the trends of online shopping by gender and by various age group in UK. From the stats we can infer that online grocery shopping is popular in a good percentage till the age of 44 years in UK.
2.Local Vendors
Another customer segment for the app will be local vendors who will use the APP to connect to a wide range of customers directly without any third part interference. Talking about Ireland, the number of people in agricultural sector are 272020 and it is found that the local food is very popular in Ireland and 7 out of 10 people prefer local suppliers because of reasons like close proximity, quality, lack of preservatives, healthy. Therefore, it provides a good scope for local vendors.
Service Gain
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Making sense of large data
As per study conducted by Statista in 2018,shows that trend in online grocery shopping is rising in US market and is estimated to reach 29.7 billion by the year 2021.
This creates a large volume of user data like products bought, viewed, brand, number of items purchased, expense, many more. Data Visualisation helps in getting key information from the buying patterns. Tools like tableau helps in generating intelligent report & make sense out of huge data which could be presented to brand partners, retailers for clear, concise, and understandable view.
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360-degree view of customer basket
With this app, the brand owners to get a complete view of user real time basket & helps them to learn more about customer buying patterns and their sentiments more deeply. This will help them to increase their customer base more & provide more promotions to shoppers. - Understand customer personality
- Cash on delivery
- Fresh products directly reaching customers
- Expense tracker for customers
Why am I interested?
The ecommerce today has a huge advantage over the traditional brick & mortar stores. With the boom of smartphone technology, people prefer doing tasks on few clicks and in a handy manner.
Traditionally, customer used to spend a lot of their time in huge stores and walking around the store to locate the desired product and the best offer. They sometimes require store assistant to help them with this job. But with the emergence of online shopping makes it easier for customer to locate products quickly without wasting much time.
As per study conducted by Statista in 2018,shows that trend in online grocery shopping is rising in US market and is estimated to reach 29.7 billion by the year 2021.People are moving towards online options to make their life easier and smoother.This is increasing the customer base of brands/companies.
People are moving towards online grocery shopping because of its convenience, transparency, home delivery option, offers and discounts etc.
Furthermore, carrying out in depth analytics in this large customer base will give online grocery stores a better understanding of what their customers yearn. Data Visualisation helps in getting key information from the buying patterns. Tools like tableau helps in generating intelligent report & make sense out of huge data which could be presented to brand partners, retailers for clear, concise, and understandable view.
Value Proposition Map
Competition & Challenges
Ireland has leading grocery market worth €9 billion and the major leaders are like Tesco, SuperValu, Aldi, Lidl, Centra out of which only Tesco, SuperValu, Centra supplies grocery online.
The smaller number of online grocery stores in Ireland is probably due to its small market size.
However, there are few challenges faced by existing supermarkets in their current online experience.
Firstly, the major challenge with respect to local suppliers is that the big market leaders don’t deal with local suppliers directly and therefore they have fixed margins for local suppliers. Also, they have big stores and outlets so the infrastructure & maintenance costs are very high which cuts down the scope for increasing the commissions for vendors further. According to a journal published on thejournal.ie (16th Sept,2018) states how farmers are unhappy with current tie ups and they are facing difficulties financially since they are unable to pay their bills. Due to this they are seeking retailers to increase their price.
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Another challenge with respect to buyers is that these existing online grocery stores don’t provide the fresh products direct from the source to the consumers. Therefore, consumers are not satisfied with the state of fruits and vegetables supplied. Also, there is no option for cash-on-delivery payment mode for buyers. This way buyers can pay on cash rather than saving their card details on app/website. Also , it will make it easier for them to check the items first and then accept the order delivery.
There is another Irish start-up entering into online groceries that is Buymie. Currently it is only operated in Dublin. The company delivers groceries to people and gets its stock from brick and motar stores. They are currently lacking their warehouse and still working upon the local tie ups.
Technology Used
A high-level technology Solution will look like below-
Registration/Login:
There will be login/signup page which can be created using web design tool. Every user will create their account in the APP and has to signup to use the APP. This will create their profile. This way APP will have the information about the user and can track their monthly expenses. For storing user information, database will be required.
Vendor Registration/Login:
There will be a separate login page for vendors. After login they will be redirected to their profile page which will store information about their products, sales, future prediction. Also, they can add/remove item into the product list as per the availability of the item in the product list.
APP functions:
After login, user can view products, search products according to categories or directly, add products to carts, select payment mode i.e. credit card/debit card/COD(Cash on Delivery).,select delivery options (express/standard/free).Again web/app designing will be used here for creating user friendly application and to improve the look and feel of the APP. Payment gateways need to be connected to the application system.
Analytical Tools:
The analytical tools will be used to provide recommendations to the customers in terms of their buying patterns and history. Also, it can be used to provide them attractive offers and attract more customers to Easy Cart Platform. Also, data visualisation tools can be used to compare the expense from the previous month and helps in making informed decisions on future spending.
It also helps local suppliers to forecast sale predictions and to know about the product in demand.
It will help them to draw more insights about their profits and losses. So that they can work upon the demand supply strategies accordingly.
Conclusion
This app will help buyers to reach wide range of products anytime anywhere. It provides flexible payment and delivery options to the buyers. This app will shadow buyers shopping experience and thus provide them with future recommendations and their monthly grocery expenditure. Easy cart will also promote local vendors to reach to direct customers and provide them with sales reports and predictions.
References
- BoardBia.ie. (2014). Irish consumers and local food. [online] Available at: https://www.bordbia.ie/industry/manufacturers/insight/alerts/pages/irishconsumersandlocalfood.aspx
- Consumerreports.org. (2015). 12 Reasons Americans Hate Grocery Shopping – Consumer Reports. [online] Available at: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/04/12-reasons-americans-hate-grocery-shopping/index.htm
- Ryan, Ó. (2018). Farmers struggling to pay bills, call on retailers to increase price of milk. [online] TheJournal.ie. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/price-of-milk-ireland-4233088-Sep2018/
- Staff, F. (2018). Why online-only supermarkets haven’t come to Ireland… yet. [online] TheJournal.ie. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/ocado-online-supermarket-ireland-3-4126444-Jul2018/
- Statista. (2018). Online food purchasing by demographic UK 2018 | Statistic. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/286116/food-and-groceries-online-purchasing-in-great-britain-by-demographic/
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