Monthly Archives: July 2016

Online grocery webstore features for efficient operations and logistics – SAP hybris RDS demo (Part 3)

In our previous posts, we discussed the must-have features for the front end of a grocery webstore, tracing the customer’s journey right from
browsing and selecting, to creating shopping lists and checking out.

To enable these features there are several admin, operations- and logistics-related functions that should be supported by your ecommerce platform. Our SAP Hybris consultant shares the essential features that an online grocery retail business must have for efficient business operations and logistics management.

In a low-margin, high-volume business like grocery retail, efficient business operations are critical and have a direct impact on the operating profits-margins. Keeping in mind this industry-wide need of efficient operations, Embitel’s Rapid Deployment Solution has been tailor-made with features that address the unique needs of the food and beverage and consumer packaged goods business. (Know more about CPG LaunchPro 100, an SAP Hybris solution for digital commerce, now launch your ecommerce website in 100 days!.)

Store-specific catalogs for better sales and inventory management

As an F&B and grocery retailer, you may have multiple stores, each with its own inventory. This inventory will change through the course of the day, and you may price items differently in different stores as part of your sales strategy. What happens to these variables when you go digital?

You can continue to maintain this system by creating multiple catalogs for your webstore. Store-specific catalogs ensure that your webstore customers have access to inventories with store-specific prices clearly displayed. This facilitates your customers to either buy from the nearest store or the store offering the best price.

Your web-store acts as a hub and builds efficiency in the system due to centralized operations

Support for centralized and decentralized order fulfillment operations

What order fulfillment strategy works best for your business

• A centralized storage and order fulfilment center, or
• Multiple fulfilment centers/fulfilling orders from existing stores?

Your webstore implementation should allow you to choose the option that suits your business best.

If you choose the latter i.e. decentralized order fulfilment, it helps to be able to customize your sourcing logic. This means giving weightage to different criteria such as distance from the delivery address, or inventory availability, or warehouse priority, for order fulfilment.

Further, you don’t want to disappoint an online customer outlet due to non-availability of an item at the nearest outlet, so you should be able to adopt a sourcing strategy for your webstore. This may require splitting the order at the item or quantity level in certain use-cases, like this one:

• The customer wishes to buy 10 bottles of jam and his nearest fulfilment center has only 5. So his order may be split up so as to satisfy the order of jam from another outlet that has the required quantity.
• Similarly, the order can be split to fulfil the requirement of perishables from the nearest outlet to ensure freshness. Or you may even choose to split the order by the modes of delivery chosen by the customer.

When it comes to everyday edibles, customers expect speedy fulfilment and these options make that possible.

Omnichannel order management tools powered by SAP Hybris, because efficiency is everything

Having a shiny storefront is great, but if there’s no substance behind the glitter (not registering orders correctly, not updating inventory, incorrect delivery schedule, lack of coordination across channels, etc.), your webstore isn’t going to go very far. The smooth shopping experience for the buyer has to be backed by high quality organization and processes on the backend, such as the order management systems on SAP Hybris platform.

SAP Hybris is an enterprise-class platform that accounts for of every step of order management, from picking the product, packing, quality check to dispatch, and facilitating interaction across channels. Even update of the inventory and delivery slot management is automated on SAP Hybris.

Smart product marketing practices to boost results

Among other benefits of opting for an enterprise-class platform are the in-built smart marketing tools available for use.

For instance, SAP Hybris recognizes the fast-moving products on your webstore and pushes them higher in the product line up. It lets you define the number of items displayed in the ‘more products’ section on each product page, and even allows you to assign weightage to in-stock inventory or brands featured here.

Your webstore backend should offer similar features to encourage sale through cross-selling and upselling items. These marketing tactics contribute to sales steadily, and having inbuilt features makes them easier to implement and customize.

Learn more about launching an Online Grocery website

• Grocery web-store features supported by SAP Hybris to help you deliver seamless shopping experience (part 1) – Multiple shopping lists, product search bar with call-to-action

• List of must-have front-end features for your online grocery website (part 2) – Shop by recipe, delivery slot selection and more

What is ecommerce logistics?

 

Logistics can be described as a functional part of the organization within the business operations. It is the management of goods and services – or simply resources – in internal processes along the supply chain; including procurement, preservation, replacement as well as inbound and outbound transportation of resources.

Source: ecommercewiki.info

What is order fulfilment?

 

the term order fulfillment refers to everything a company does between receiving an order from a customer (the point of sale) and placing the product in the customer’s hands.

Source: rileylife.com

What is SAP Hybris Marketing?

 

Hybris Marketing enables real-time contextual marketing. It allows marketers to develop a deeper understanding of customers and leverage these insights to deliver highly individualized customer experiences across channels.

Source: hybris.com

Grocery webstore features for a seamless shopping experience – hybris RDS demo (Part 2)

In the first part of our series on the features one must include when building an online grocery store, we discussed some of the front-end features for the customer’s browsing convenience. In this post, we discuss some of the features designed for a smooth checkout experience for your customers.

As a low-margin but high-volume business in a country with a huge untapped market, the grocery sector has the potential for immense success. To unlock this potential, your business needs a webstore designed keeping in mind the specific needs of online grocery shopping.

The features listed below, tailormade for an online grocery web store, have been pre-tested and pre-packaged in CPG LaunchPro100, a hybris-based rapid deployment solution from Embitel Technologies.

List of front-end features

Repeat orders for speed shopping

Grocery is a regular requirement in each household, and more often than not, consumers have a standard list of items they replenish periodically.

Keeping this in mind, making the provision to reorder items from one’s previous list, or reorder the entire saved shopping list, encourages quick and easy purchase.

Shop by recipe

CPG LaunchPro features an interesting section for recipes—like the recipe for pasta? Simply order the ingredients from the recipe page itself and the consumer will be good to go, without going through the entire process of searching for each item and then adding it to the cart.

Encouraging trust through pickup and/or delivery

Grocery shopping is different: customers have always expressed concern regarding the purchase of perishable items such as fresh fruit and vegetables, poultry and meat. For such items, consumers like to see, touch, even smell the products before purchase to ensure freshness and good quality.

For this, the omnichannel retail feature of ‘click-and-collect’ is particularly useful: place your order online, and collect your goods from the store after inspection.

So CPG LaunchPro, a 100-day implementation solution, allows consumers opt for delivery or click-and-collect, or even a combination both for different parts of an order.

Delivery slot selection

Grocery shopping often means buying perishables, or buying fresh produce to be utilized at a specific time for meal preparation. So consumers want to be present to receive their order, instead of finding it languishing outside the door for hours and losing freshness.

Keeping this in mind, retailers must let the consumers choose a delivery time slot. If the slot options are populated into the site based on concurrent logistics, it will avoid disappointment for the customer.

Customer acquisition through discounts and promotional offers

The biggest driver for consumers is price, and offering seasonal discounts or promotions at certain thresholds encourages them to buy more. Displaying these on the checkout page gives the consumer the satisfaction of scoring a good deal and saving even as they pay their bill.

Payment methods to suit all needs

Offering a variety of payment methods such as by credit or debit card, cash on delivery, coupons and points, helps the retailer to reach out to a larger number of people, an important factor to offset the low margins in the grocery and FMCG sector.

Reviews and social media sharing

Consumers trust reviews from fellow buyers and tend to frequent webstores that carry reviews to help them make a decision. This feature will encourage footfall as well purchase.

Social media sharing is a must on our ecommerce websites cater to consumers’ desire to share info of their latest purchases with their network.

Don’t forget to include all these features in a user-friendly and cohesive manner on your website. The guidance and experience of a good UI designer can be valuable here.

While you are giving your consumers a smooth and pleasant shopping experience with all these features, how do you fulfil them? With solid backend operations, of course.

Watch out for our next post on the backend functions required to carry out the above conveniences and manage operations efficiently.

Launching an ecommerce website? Challenges faced by small and medium enterprises

You have a revolutionary business idea (B2B or B2C) and a passionate team who believes in this idea. You have identified your target market and are evaluating the most appropriate channel to help you reach your buyers.

Or

You are a successful offline business that has built a trustworthy brand over years of hard-work, persistence and adherence to quality.You have built a loyal customer base, mainly through word of mouth, within a certain locality, city, region or geography.

Your business is now ready for the expansion phase by reaching a wider audience. You are evaluating the most appropriate channel to achieve the same.

In this internet-based economy, it is highly likely that your evaluation would indicate the need for ‘Launching an ecommerce web-store’ for your business!

Can your web-store be a Flipkart or Amazon from day-1?

Let’s ask ourselves this most difficult question first! And we have a very simple answer to this. It’s ‘N O !’

Developing an ecommerce web-store is a technology intensive project. It is a store that is accessible 24/7 on internet.Similar to an offline store, your web-store needs to support the front-end and back-end business operations.

Ecommerce companies need the support of an army of tech teams to manage business operations with the help of web-based technologies.And hence when the likes of PwC release reports about the top challenges faced by ecommerce companies, ecommerce technology, its scalability, its agility and capital investments in infrastructure are a regular feature.

PwC report – eCommerce in India: Drivers and Challenges

What approach should my business have towards ecommerce?

There are companies that take a CAPEX (capital expenditure) intensive route to realize their ecommerce aspirations.However, for Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs), the incremental approach which requires minimum CAPEX is more suitable.

The strength of SMEs lies in their ability to serve very niche markets, provide customizations and customer intimacy instead of serving mass markets (which is the arena ofthe big players, with deep pockets).

Thus you need an ecommerce solution which helps you play your strengths and doesn’t ask for deep pockets for technology investment.

Is there a checklist to help me evaluate an ecommerce solution?

When you select an ecommerce solution to take your business online, keeping the following points in mind will increase your chances of a good outcome:

The ecommerce solution should be ready to launch, so it should include all the essential basic modules, which have been pre-tested

The ready-to-launch web-store should have been tested for all the cyber security threats

The web-store is integrated with highly secure payment gateway and shipping modules

The web-store has the provision for integration with your legacy systems(if any)

UI/UX of the web-store can be customized as per your brand guidelines

It is designed on a cost-effective and enterprise class ecommerce platform

There is provision of PostGo-Live support and maintenance

Solution is scalable – it supports incremental development and addition of more advanced features

Now that you have the checklist, it’s time to evaluate the solutions and find the best match for your business goals.

In the follow-up post, we will evaluate the ‘Magento Go-Live Box’, a rapid deployment solution for Small and Medium Businesses.Watch this space for more details!

For any queries or to know more details, contact our project team here

What is Magento Commerce platform?

Magento is an ecommerce platform built on open source technology which provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store.Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.

(Source – commonplaces.com)