Improve In-Store Grocery Shopping experience

disclaimer : this was result of 30 mins brainstorm, any feedback on how to improve it is most welcome :). assumptions are mentioned as well.

why?

• assuming we are a large retailer complex with multiple aisles such as bakery, ready made foods, drinks, meat and groceries and are seeing complaints about our grocery experiences.
• with the advent of grocery delivery startups, we have to improve experience to stay relevant to get and retain footfall per month/quarter.

what?

• want to reduce hassle people go through while purchasing groceries like finding correct kind of aisle, nutrition content per item etc.
• essentially want to upsell more offerings or motivate people to get more items.

personas -

• married women, aged 30–45 staying in metro cities, working at a 9 to 5 and want the fresh ingredients with family and shop once a week.
• old couple, aged 65, shopping once a month and very conscious about the nutrients/ingridients and might be scared of the allergies or implications with the medicines that they are consuming.
• college students, aged 18–25, shop fortnightly, finding the cheapest items and still trying to balance the weekly calorie intake, want to purchase at least some amount of ice cream or other junk food.

with experience, married women & old couple have very good idea of what kind of fresh ingredients are needed and which recipes they can make. a large chunk of college students are just learning how to grocery shop and will divert to ready made foods easily if a good shopping experience is not created.

so, we are improving the experience for college students on a budget.

pain points -

• can’t afford expensive things.
• tired to eating the same kind of ready made food.
• difficultly trying to choose correct ingredients for recipes.
• have no idea of what price for particular is acceptable (could fit their budget).
• don’t want to miss on some occasional treats like ice creams.

considering the impact of adding Grocery Day Feature to mobile app, I believe it is a better solution.

once a week, students decide two factors -

• budget
• dishes they want to eat next week (yes, app will have recipes — pre meal notification)
• calories (optional)

based on the budget + dishes, auto populate the list of grocery items needed -

• include aisle number
• portion of each item(+ downloadable in-store map)
• calorie of each item(optional)
• scratch once item is added to cart

after the last item is picked, add a surprise element of their favorite snack with some offer for the first few orders. (to create delight). after first n (~5–10) orders, mobile app notifications to move for bulk purchases of the weekly units with more discounts.

metrics -

• number orders per account
• number of edits in the cart during week
• count of dishes by cuisine
• average items per cart
• number of calorie conscious orders
• split of macros per order (protein/fat/etc)
• churn rate