How Online Grocery Marketplaces Are Empowering Small Businesses

E-commerce is now becoming the most common mode of shopping. It is revolutionizing the traditional methods of shopping and offering the customers with the ease of doing shopping at their convenient time and place. E-commerce is not restricted to a particular business vertical, almost all the businesses are having an e-commerce portal. E-commerce is now getting overtaken by M-commerce, as mobiles are more convenient to use. The marketplace is the one where the buyers can find the potential sellers. These Online Grocery Marketplaces are one such place where the buyer need not go to any particular place, rather they can find the seller just with the help of few clicks. Let us make a comparison between the traditional shopping system and the online marketplace for shopping. Mobile apps have made online ordering easier than ever. To fulfill the demand of mobile apps for the grocery sector, there have many mobile app development companies came to the market.

In the traditional method, one has to visit the seller place where the seller displays the products they have, and if the customer wants to make a comparison between the products offered by other sellers. This can be avoided using the online marketplace, where the buyer is presented with products of the various seller at one place, i.e., online. Just with the help of a few clicks, the buyer can make the comparison of various products and their prices and can get the best product at the best price. The seller needs to pay for using the space on the web and the responsibility of delivering the product will be on the vendor.

This kind of selling is beneficial for both buyers and sellers, especially small scale business owners owing to various benefits. Starting from small scale businesses like hand-crafted, bakery stuff, etc, everything can be made available on the web. Now, let us look into various things which proves that online marketplaces are best for small scale grocery businesses.

Firstly, let us look into the grocery business models, which fall under three models:

1. Inventory model: There are no profits shared in this model, and this is for big grocery business which sells its own inventory
2. Marketplace model: These are for small business who share their profits for using the marketplace of someone else.
3. Hybrid model: As the name suggests, this model is the combination of both inventory and marketplace, where the seller has their own platform for selling and also they will allow others to use their platform also, by taking some commission.

Out of the three models, Marketplace is the better option for small scale businesses as it avoids the cost and headache of maintaining the inventories for selling their products.

Working of Grocery Marketplace

The two vital factors which decide the success rate of online grocery business are

• Involving local vendors in the platform
• Having a strong delivery network that ensures on-time delivery to the customers

The entire process is as simple as the marketplace owner invites vendors for displaying their products on their platform and after the customer has placed an order, the delivery of the product is done charging the respective amount for the product at the marketplace’s own end. From the marketplace owner, the vendor will be getting the amount after deducting their commission.

Not only the commission from the vendors but also the marketplace owners will get the money from the various other sources, mainly via primary revenue of periodic subscription of the customers and the secondary revenue methods include the following

-Banner Ads

– Branded merchandise

-Trading data to research firms

– Featured contents like the product of the week

– Sponsored blog content

Different marketplace places may follow a different strategy for attracting their target audiences.

Factors Affecting the Success of Grocery Marketplace

There are so many factors which make the grocery marketplace successful, out of all these, the main factor is understanding the psyche of the customers. Following are the most probable factors which affect the success

-Ease in Product discovery

Whenever any customer visits your online grocery marketplace, the first and the foremost important thing to consider is that the customer needs to find their desired product easily. Without which it would be annoying for the customer. No customer will have so much patience for undergoing long navigation to find their desired product, so, the optimization algorithm should be simple. Also, maintain the records of feedbacks (both positive and negative) of the customer is very important.

-UI Interface

The display of the products plays a vital role. This applies not only to the online stores, but also it applies to offline stores as well. A well-organized product will trigger the customer to buy that product even though they don’t need it. Coming to online stores, the customers will feel like buying the product if the navigation towards the product is made simple, good categorization of products, great presentation of the product with 3f high quality.

-Wishlist and Shopping Cart

Having a wishlist to the shopping website is always advantageous to know the customer’s most preferred items. But for a grocery marketplace, the wishlist is not mandatory, but it leaves with additional advantages.

The shopping cart is easy to use and it is important to note that the adding and/or removing the products in the shopping cart should be made easy in order to avoid the situations where the customers wish like uninstalling the m-commerce app for small businesses

Also Read: cost to develop online grocery app

-Need to offer the best delivery

Delivery of the product should be made fast, easy and convenient. Without which, there is a high risk of losing potential customers. Even though, taking care of all the other things, in particular, ignoring the delivery system will greatly affect the business. Fast in-time delivery with best quality products is the key to success, especially groceries.

• Payment mode

The payment for the transaction needs to be made so simple and easy. If it is not direct and simple, then there are chances that customers may not feel it reliable. So use simple payment modes like PayPal, Stripe, and such.

-The reputation of the marketplace

There might be so many vendors in a particular marketplace, so it should be taken care that the performance of all the vendor is up to the mark for maintaining a healthy reputation of the marketplace. For this to happen, the feedbacks given by the customers play a vital role.

Conclusion:

The Marketplace owners need to take care of both technical and non-technical aspects for the success of the business. Though they need not bother about the shipping and inventory, yet there are so many things to learn. No doubt, marketplaces are one of the best ways to earn huge money that too grocery business which is one of the basic necessities of life, results in sure success.

FuGenX has developed many highly successful grocery apps including Big Basket App, with advanced features and functionalities. We can design the grocery apps with multi-platform compatibility.

You can send your app requirements to info@fugenx.ae or visit fugenx.ae