The rise of the informed customer

Most of the retail/grocery business are still running operations that are set up to serve traditional customers. Traditional customers used mostly one channel, visited same stores, and were mostly aware only of those products listed by their favorite retailer. Those customers were also prepared to drive to store and wait patiently in cashier lines.

Today’s customers are much different, using multiple channels (web, brick and mortar, print, television, etc.), are very well informed and increasingly impatient. They expect retailers to offer them best shopping experience each and every time. As time is becoming increasingly scarce, expectations are shifting also in direction of most convenient shopping experience. Shifting the business to support this new customer requires adopting new omni channel sales and delivery strategies. With today’s complex and unresponsive supply chains which lack data transparency, such shift is particularly challenging.

Customer centricity challenge

As customers become increasingly more demanding in their desire for a seamless shopping experience, the role of the brick and mortar store is shifting. If consumer expectations and experiences ultimately determine a company’s success, then it is essential that companies put themselves in a position to better accommodate consumer demands.

Increasingly popular way to satisfy consumer demands in terms of fulfillment processes is offering in store pickup fulfillment (also named BOPIS — Buy Online Pickup In Store). Successful implementation of BOPIS is exceptionally challenging as requires sophisticated coordination between in-store technology and store associates. Many of the retailers who implemented BOPIS failed to generate expected benefits as lacking seamlessly coordinated processes, making customer unsatisfied with the overall experience.

Major challenges with BOPIS are unified pricing strategies (online and in store), inability to provide accurate cross-store inventory visibility, customers required to enter store in order to pick up order, inconvenient working hours for order pickup, and inconvenient store locations.

Based on iVend Retail report, nearly 57% of all shoppers use BOPIS omnichannel service, but only 31% describe it as being a smooth process.

By Forrester Research (2016) only 33% of retailers implemented BOPIS due to above listed challenges related to technology and in store operations.

As in store fulfillment strategy has its challenges and limitations, retailers are increasingly implementing and offering to consumers “pick up box” delivery, enabling customer to decide on the most convenient location and time to pick up ordered products. This strategy eliminates many of the above mentioned shortcomings of BOPIS (inventory visibility, working hours, in store processes, etc.)

Role of the technology

There is lots of buzz around new technologies and their potential to change how consumers engage with businesses, what is missing, is the clear view on what are customers’ demands and which technologies could serve those demands. Multiple articles and research publications are providing insight on key technologies serving customer demands, below is a summary of most relevant ones.

Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS):

Enables customers to browse, shop and buy online, and then pick up their products in the store of their choice. Benefit of BOPIS are low costs of fulfillment, as no final mile delivery costs. The negative side is complex implementation preventing smaller retailers to invest in BOPIS, Poor Implementation,

Lack of physical stores carrying the product, Lack of signage and guidance.

Overall consumers often don’t find it particularly practical as store locations could be out of their daily travel route and consumer still needs to tackle with long lines and crowds in stores, especially during sales peaks (holidays). In fact, users who aren’t satisfied with the end-to-end experience are likely to stop using it altogether.

Click & Collect points:

Providing customers most convenient option for delivery of goods purchased online. Customer can search, shop and buy online, and as part of checkout process decide on the most convenient Click & Collect point.

As Click & Collect points are providing service for multiple companies (shared service — usually by the 3PL provider) the number of locations and spread across the cities is much better than individual retailer store locations. The additional benefit comparing to BOPIS is that consumer can decide on most convenient time (24/7) to pick up goods from the box station.

Click & Collect points are becoming a standard option for the CPG final mile delivery, whereas there is yet no large network of Click & Collect points supporting Grocery final mile delivery.

COOLOMAT market is on a mission to change this gap in final mile delivery offering, providing retailers and producers with viable and cost efficient Grocery Click & Collect solution.

Coolomats are remotely managed externally situated machines with cooled and deep-frozen lockers. All Click & Collect points will offer the payment of orders with miscellaneous cryptocurrencies including CMK token, and fiat.

Consumer Ratings & Reviews:

Availability of a mobile app or website enabling reading other customers’ ratings and reviews prior to making a purchase decision. User reviews are proven sales drivers, and something the majority of customers will want to see before deciding to make a purchase.

A recent survey by Podium highlights that 93% of consumers say that online reviews do impact their purchasing decisions. With 82% of consumers stating that regularly reading the reviews before making a purchase decision, and 60% of them look at reviews on a weekly basis. The survey also suggests that two-thirds of consumers (68%) are willing to pay up to 15% more for the same product or service if they are assured they will have a better experience. The report suggests that customers do trust and engage with online reviews regularly and these reviews remain very influential when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

Ratings and reviews benefit businesses by increased sales, establishing credibility, helping to understand your customers, and increasing customer loyalty.

Coolomat market enables consumer reviews as standard functionality of Coolomat marketplace with “peer review” feature.

With this producers and retailers offering their products on Coolomat market gain access to increasingly important consumers reviews driving higher sales volumes. Through smart contracts, the consumer will have the possibility to leave a review about their purchase experience. What follows is that customers may be rewarded a number of native Coolomat market tokens for leaving reviews by the producer.

Mobile Wallet:

Payment method that allows customers to make payments using a smartphone instead of paying with a credit card or cash.

Coolomat Market will introduce its own token enabling payment on the platform. Each user will have their internal platform token wallet.

Shipping Drones:

Drones would be used to deliver small purchases (instead of conventional shipping/deliver methods). The downside of drones is legal and social impact of the technology which could postpone real life usage or highly limit it due to strict regulations.

Wrapping it all together

As Omnichannel and eCommerce sales are on the rise, retailers are faced with new challenges in providing seamless end-to-end experience for ever more demanding consumers. The challenges are spanning from management of eCommerce market platforms, providing easy and quality browsing, shopping and checkout functionalities, to supply chain challenges with inventory control and visibility, suppliers management, quality control, eCommerce fulfillment operations and high cost of final mile delivery.

All of these challenges require innovative solutions employing emerging distributed ledger/blockchain technologies as part of innovative business models supported by agile supply chains capable to react on fast pace of changes in consumer behaviors and demands.

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Tibor Vister, Coolomat Market Supply Chain Advisor

For information about Coolomat Market, read our Whitepaper and visit our Website.

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