When it comes to running an online grocery business, your site is part of your product. The experience it creates for your customers can make the difference between a sale and no sale. If your products are good, your deliveries on time, and your prices fair, but you’re still not seeing the numbers you were hoping for, your site may need an upgrade.
A good user experience (UX) aims to reduce the time and effort it takes for a customer to successfully buy your products. There are many things you can do, such as minimize bugs, improve the user interface (UI), offer a wide range of payment options, and add useful new features.
As a business owner, I have seen the miraculous effects of a good online grocery user experience in action. I’m here to show you the best improvements you can make to get the best results.
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11 Ways to Optimize Your Online Grocery User Experience
Whether you're just starting out or your store has been online for a while, improving your UX is always a good idea. Here are a few tips on how to do that quickly and easily.
1. Clear Guidance for First-Time Users
All services have a target audience, but for online grocery shopping, that audience is much broader than most. Everyone needs food, and everyone wants ease and efficiency. This means that any household within the delivery area is a potential customer.
With such a varied pool of clients, accessibility is extremely important. Step-by-step guidance for first-time users will improve your sales by decreasing the number of customers that give up before they complete a purchase or make mistakes that negatively affect their experience.
You can make your store friendlier for new users by adding a large, visible button, banner, or pop-up with a call to action (CTA) for first-time users. This CTA could grab attention with a special deal or advertise the easy registration process.
Here are some examples of a successful CTA:
- Get a 10% Discount Today
- Pick Your Free Delivery Time
- Register In 3 Minutes
2. Easy Registration Process
Considering the size of the average online grocery purchase and the frequency people need groceries, registration makes the process easier for everyone. But in order to keep users from clicking away, it’s important to keep the account creation process as short, simple, and smooth as possible.
Allowing users to sign up with Facebook, Google, or Apple is one way to get new customers registered quickly. Address validation and autocomplete features also help speed up the process, along with multiple payment methods accepted for maximum convenience.
3. Simple Delivery Slot Reservation
Many people see grocery delivery services as a backup option when they are unable to make time for a shopping trip. They often have specific time requirements, and appreciate a booking system that makes delivery times and prices clear.
It's vital to inform the customer how long their slot is reserved for and keep this information in plain sight during the shopping process. If a customer loses their slot without feeling they were duly warned, they may feel your service has wasted their time and isn’t worth using again.
Transparency and ease of use are two of the most important factors that come into play when you run an online grocery business.
4. Efficient Product Search
When people buy their weekly groceries, they’ll be adding many different items to their cart. It can take a while to search for these items one by one, so improving the efficiency of your product search can earn you easy points with your customers.
The first way to do this is by having a responsive search suggestions feature that can amend its autocomplete suggestions with every letter typed. Another popular search feature is “list searching,” which allows users to paste an entire shopping list into the search bar at once and work through the results one by one.
5. Useful Product Suggestions
Showing related products in the sidebar on product pages can be beneficial for both the customer and your business. For the customer, when a recommendation is on point, it saves them from having to type their next search or introduces them to a new and interesting product. It can even help remind them of an item they had forgotten they needed.
For your business, it provides ample opportunity for cross-selling and increasing the amount of money spent. To be successful, suggestions should be based on products that are often used together. For example, you could suggest pasta sauces when a user searches for pasta.
6. Secure Shopping Lists and Favorites
No matter how many user-friendly UX features you implement, a customer’s first purchase at your store is likely to take a significant amount of time. However, the next purchases can be much shorter. By automatically saving order history and allowing users to make their own saved shopping lists, you can save your customers time and effort.
It’s also important to remember that customers value their privacy, and that extends to information on what they buy, as well as how they pay for it. Enhancing the security of your checkout system can help build trust with your customers, and of course, help prevent data breaches.
7. Add to Cart Shortcuts
When shopping for groceries, customers will want to buy products they’ve already bought before, meaning they don’t need to see the product information. To save time, an Add To Cart shortcut lets them quickly select the item and choose a quantity without having to open a new page.
8. On-Screen Shopping Cart
When you let shoppers view their cart without having to open a new page, you create a smoother experience for them. You’ll want to display important information, such as the number of items and the total cost.
You can also take advantage of this feature to highlight possible offers the customer may have missed. For instance, when a user only adds one unit of a product with a “buy two get one free” offer, you can display a message underneath the item.
9. Robust Selection of Payment Methods
No matter how much a customer might enjoy your store, they could still turn away when they reach checkout if you don't currently support their preferred payment method.
Picking the right payment options for your business is crucial, and it doesn’t have to be a headache. With Pay.com, you can provide your customers with a wide range of payment options. There’s even more in it for you: Pay.com comes with quick setup and easy integration into your website, and you can keep track of all your transactions, analytics, and insights from your Pay Dashboard.
10. Smooth Checkout Process
There are a number of factors to consider when creating your checkout process. The first is, of course, making sure it’s well designed, customized to match your brand, and optimized for the best UX.
Allowing users to add a comment regarding the delivery helps them feel in control, and also helps your drivers get the orders to the right places.
It's also important to be upfront and clear about any additional charges you may add for your packing and delivery service, such as bags, cool boxes, or the wrapping of fragile items.
11. Optimizing Your Store for Mobile Users
Online grocery shopping is all about convenience, and optimizing your online store for mobile users will give them the freedom to choose when and where they want to shop.
When you combine a well-made mobile site with other features like saved shopping lists and product suggestions, your customers will be able to complete a grocery order anytime, anywhere.
However, the benefits are not the only thing you need to consider. Mobile-friendly sites and apps are now so common that many users consider them a basic requirement. If your site doesn’t work on mobile or doesn’t run well on different browsers, it could have a negative impact on your store’s sales.
With mobile payment methods like Google Pay and Apple Pay becoming more and more popular, you’ll want to be sure you have a way to accept mobile payments on your website.
The Bottom Line: Create the Best User Experience for Your Online Grocery
One of an online grocery store’s biggest goals is to provide a quicker, more convenient, and more efficient shopping experience than any on-site supermarket can offer. In order to achieve this, you need to do more than simply deliver products to doors – you need to perfect the shopping process as well.
You need to prioritize your customers’ needs at all times, including building their trust in your service. You need a well-built site, some time-saving features, ample security assurances, and familiar payment options.
If you want to be able to provide these features for your customers, you should check out what Pay.com has to offer. When you sign up for Pay.com, you can add as many payment methods as you like with a single click. You can also improve your payment security and checkout optimization, making everything simpler for you and your customers.
