With online grocery shopping predicted to double in popularity in 2016, now is a fitting time for supermarkets to optimize their online offerings. Raley’s Family of Fine Stores has taken this cue with the recent launch of E-Cart to bolster its online grocery offering.
The E-Cart is designed to enable shoppers to not just order groceries on Raleys.com but to offer them a personalized journey, regardless of the device used to access the site, and also to allow them to pick up their order within the store. Shoppers can pick up items at select Raley’s, Bel Air Market or Nob Hill Foods locations.
The retailer partnered with omnichannel commerce solutions provider Unata to launch both a new e-Commerce web site and an updated mobile application. The launch featured an enhanced user interface that allows customers to continue their purchase process seamlessly as they move between a mobile device and a desktop computer.
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“Our overall goal was to improve the interface and personalized customer interaction,” said Keith Knopf, COO at Raley’s. “Specifically, we wanted to provide a consistent experience for customers across mobile and desktop as well as provide the option to pay for their order online.”
Optimizing The ‘Digital Customer Experience’
The E-Cart implementation; the launch of the buy-online, pickup in store option; and the site optimization are all part of a larger Raley’s “Digital Customer Experience,” according to Knopf. As part of that experience, consumers can arrange their online shopping by top deals, store aisles or most popular items.
“Our customers deserve the same level of great service and fresh products from our online fulfillment as they experience in our stores,” said Knopf in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “This means finding their favorite products easily, being very selective regarding perishable items, and having the order available when they want it. We are confident this new system will enable a seamless and convenient shopping experience.”
For the mobile experience, Unata helped Raley’s build out a completely responsive design, using a grid format designed to ensure product displays remained consistent regardless of size of device or screen. As part of the change, Unata phased out techniques that didn’t translate well from desktop to other mobile devices, such as drop-down menus and hover-over pop-ups.
“Project scoping began last summer,” Knopf revealed. “The team did a great job working through the first and largest phase of technical integration. In order to develop an improved personalized shopping experience, we moved deliberately to allow additional time for testing and improvements.”
Historical Data Makes The Process Personal
The updated Raley’s e-Commerce platform is grounded in Unata’s automated machine-learning recommendation engine, enabling the retailer to offer one-to-one shopping experiences. The home page, product catalog, product recommendations, sales notifications and search results that consumers view on the web site are personalized based on customers’ ongoing shopping behaviors, both online and in-store.
“The shopper therefore doesn’t have to sift through thousands of products online to find what they want to buy,” said Chris Bryson, CEO of Unata. “They can spend less time shopping and more time doing the things they love.”
Driving the personalized experience is the collection and synching of Raley’s customer data, which can be linked back to the individual customer’s ID. With this data in hand, Raley’s can enable shoppers to start their shopping list at home on one device and access it on another device later in the day, whether at the office, in the store or on the go.
“Since Raley’s customers have been shopping online for years, we have a large amount of historical purchase data from both their online purchases and in-store purchases through their Something Extra rewards program,” Bryson concluded. “We can use this data to prime the recommendation engine so that a customer’s shopping experience with E-Cart will be personalized and relevant — and therefore quicker and more convenient — right off the bat.”