Do you see Salesforce solutions playing a role in this transformation?
Grocers used to outsource digital to a few third party vendors with a small percentage of sales going through the channel. It was a great strategy to test and learn how to go digital and dip your toes into this channel. Now that it’s making up a significantly larger portion of revenue and is the front door to the shopping experience, most retailers are working to bring it in-house and increase their own expertise.
If you are going to do digital grocery, you are going to need to be proficient at merchandising all of your products and your digital shelf. Previously, grocery stores did not have ecommerce sites and product inventory available online. Unlike other categories of retail which might have a single product detail page per item, every grocery store within the same chain may have a different inventory and assortment of products, therefore you are essentially maintaining thousands of sites. Also, in comparison to traditional retail ecommerce, there is a significantly higher churn as the inventory is more dynamic and perishable.
Bringing these in-house, you are looking not only at an ecommerce platform solution, but you are also looking at other factors. For example, driving increase impulse purchases with Einstein recommendations based on Sales Cloud and DMP to know about past behaviors and know what products to expose the customer to and what free samples to put in the bag. Then you are also looking at Marketing Cloud to get them to reorder the list and communicating with them in between visits. This creates a need for not one Salesforce product but all of the Salesforce stack to work together.