E-Grocery Essay

by Simon Hopes Author

Due to rapid increase in online shopping in UAE,fruits and vegetables are the untapped venture regarding online shopping. Grocery commodities are one of the typical daily purchases for many people in UAE, but with all the technology around, most people purchase their grocery directly from grocery stores. E-grocery is the remedy for this regular grocery store visits. Everything is made more accessible for the clients. All the clients are required to download the app, the key in what they want, then in a few hours the stuff will be available at the doorstep of the clients. For your information, clients do not cater for transportation costs.

 

What products does E-grocery sell? We will sell all types of fruits that are consumed in the UAE. These fruits include papaya, bananas, pomegranates, citrus, grapes, pineapples, mango, coconut, oranges, strawberry, blueberries, watermelons, and many others. What of the vegetables? We will have fresh and nutritious vegetables for our clients. The vegetables will range from traditional to exotic ones (Anckar et al. 215). Our vegetables will include mint leaves, mushrooms, cucumber, coriander, kales, ginger, tomato, dill leaves, broccoli, spinach, celery leaves, chills, okra local, and various types of potatoes. Our grocery will also deliver organic eggs, coffee and honey to clients.

 

This grocery website store targets different economic classes of population in UAE. There are no specific targets; products are for everybody because we want every phone in UAE to have the store in their phones. Prices and delivery of the products will be driving factors for the venture. Prices and quality of the products will not be tampered with when the products are transported to their various destinations. All of the deliveries will be at the client's stipulated time. We will provide coupons for loyal clients and also for those clients that purchase a large amount of commodities.

 

Order fulfilment process

From the top left, you can see how we receive orders. There are three different ways we can receive orders from our customers. They include; shopping cart integration, CSV order file and Manual order entry.

 

Generally, we will prefer direct integration with a shopping cart, but in some cases especially business to business orders will prefer manual entry orders. In the long run, we have a plan to expand our services beyond UAE especially to Yemen and Syria. That's why we have included CSV files in our processes. With the CSV files, clients are required to submit their up-to-date list of the product they want.

 

Once we receive the requests, our operation crew prints the pending orders. Order prints take place multiple times a day. An expedited order, that’s five hours to one-day orders are given priority to ensure fast turnaround time.

 

Orders are sorted by production center within our facility. Because we deal with a myriad of grocery products, our warehouse is optimized for speed and efficiency. As we print orders, we will identify any special picking or packing instructions that may be associated with a particular order. For instance, we will allow our customers to specify what they will prefer to pack their items.

 

Once the orders are printed and sorted, the next move on the flowchart is picking, packing, and shipping. There are a couple of quality control checks to ensure order fulfilment accuracy during this process. Most of the units are picked in batches before moving to a sortation area. At the sortation area, units are grouped into individual orders then moved to the packing station.

 

Our packing team will be trained to pack orders in small boxes or packages with adequate protection. This will cut down the dimensional weight of the package, hence, saving clients' money. Prior to transportation, addresses of clients will be thoroughly verified using specialized software. After verification, we will split orders, label them, and transport them to various destinations. Concerning shipping, we will complete customs paperwork for international orders. 

 

Until we penetrate the international market, we will use ship confirmation for the local market. Once the prescribed orders are transported, we will close the orders in our fulfilment control panel. Clients are able to see the panel. Also, we will also integrate shopping carts which will allow submissions of tracking numbers, we will send tracking numbers of each order to each client. This will trigger orders to close within their cart, and also tracking emails will be sent to clients.

 

Due to a large number of orders, there may be a confusion element within our packaging team. They may pack and print orders to wrong clients. This problem will be solved by ensuring we have various departments for specific goods (Morganosky et al. 20).

 

Facility locations will play an important role in our business. Various considerations will be made when selecting a warehouse facility for our products and equipment. We need locations that will save a business time, money, and give us the confidence to build and sustain a competent supply chain. These considerations include; outer area accessibility thich is a key consideration when we will be searching for warehouses. The areas must accommodate our semi-trucks and large equipment unconditionally. Another consideration will be sufficient electricity. We are dealing with perishable goods. Without electricity, we will incur huge losses. The warehouses must have adequate power with adequate back-ups.

 

Proximity to transportation media will be another consideration. The warehouses should be near to roads, railways, and airports. We need goods to be in stores at the right time and to be delivered to the clients at the prescribed time. We will also consider maintenance and operating expenses. Property owners should take care of all the maintenance and operating expenses such as insurance and taxes for all of our intended warehouses. Our budget is squeezed; we don't involve ourselves in warehouses’ maintenance and operating costs

 

Usable space- In all spaces, we will occupy, we will calculate usable space against unusable space. We will do the measurement on the usable area and calculate the worthiness. Then we will negotiate the worthiness of an unusable area. Security is another factor that cannot be overlooked. We need to know the safety of the area before renting the warehouse. We take criminal history of the area and the lighting system serious. Layout and flow of the building as well are major concerns. We don't intend to use old buildings as our warehouses since some factors such ceiling height and column spaces may hamper our operations. We need houses that are spacious that cannot bother inward flow of products and outward flow supplies.Zoning and customers base is also another element that we will take seriously when renting the warehouses. We need warehouses where clients will feel comfortable when they visit us.

 

Distribution model

Currently, there are various distribution models in UAE, but we opt to use the direct distribution model for all of our products. This is because we are targeting every customer across the board, that's from retailers, wholesalers, supermarkets to individual customers. We also want to have complete control of all of our outlets. All of our products will be transported to clients using our refrigerated semi-trucks (Moses and Babu 10). Why direct distribution model for our business?

 

We consider the perishability of our goods. We are dealing with products that can go bad in a few hours or days. The goods need to be at the customer place once ordered. We don't want intermediary between clients and us because quality may be compromised within the exchange. Another reason for the choice of this model is that we need direct customer feedback. We want to improve in various aspects, and the only way we can improve is via customer feedback. These direct feedbacks whether positive or negative will enable us to conform to customer's expectations.

 

We are afraid of counterfeits. Bearing in mind the strategies we have put in place our brand will be one of the leading online grocery delivery industry. You all know what happens with leading brands, counterfeits chips from left right. We want to do delivery ourselves to safeguard our brand. This model is to us a marketing tool. Once we are on the ground, we will use the opportunity to advertise our products and services via word of mouth. Intermediaries will not give us this edge; instead they will be propelling their agenda at the expense of our products.

The model will help us on spying our competitors. It gives us a platform to meet our competitors’ clients and know what they are doing. We will counter our competitors using real information we have acquired from competitors. Also, we will position products rightly against competitors' products.

 

We will use Orderhive software to control all of our inventories. We prefer Orderhive because of it multitasks, that's, it controls inventory and manages inventory. Regarding product management, Orderhive will help us in carrying out extensive product information in its database, which will provide accurate information on particular products and quick filters. It will also help us to create product variants such as four sizes for single SKU and even selling products in bundles.

 

The software is compatible with the barcode system; this will enable us to do all inventory control activities by merely scanning barcodes. Barcodes will dictate receiving of products from the purchase order, put up the stock count, and pack the products for orders. This will avoid manual interaction with our products and improve inventory control. Order hive will also help us in real-time inventory tracking, stock updates across all departments, low stock alerts, stock visibility and stock transfer across all channels. 

 

Just like every other business, we're anticipating some wastes in our industry. As we start, there's a possibility of us having more employees than required. This will cost us concerning the salary paid to employees. We will address these waste using two dynamics. We will introduce over-time allowances. The allowances will give employees more hours to increase their income. As a result, we will chop a sizeable number of employees to remain with a few employees who will work for more hours. It must be noted the hourly allowances will not be equivalent to enormous salaries. Also, we will offer various pieces of training to our employees on multiple courses which will enable them to multi-task. For instance, our clerk should have financial/accounting skills (Kempiak and Mark, 202). This will allow us to hire a single individual to perform the two tasks.

 

Since we are handling perishable goods, occasionally we may experience rotting of products especially fruits. We are prepared to have a proper storage system across all of our transporting trucks and warehouses. We will not introduce any preservatives but an efficient cooling system across our facilities. As newbies, we don't have financial muscles to put up cooling plants in every facility, but with time we will conquer rotting.

 

Our business involves a lot of transportation; fuel can cause another waste we may incur. This one's tricky, but we will have to deal with it. First, we need to know the capacity one truck will carry, routes distance and the time taken between the routes. This will give us a rough estimate on what we are supposed to do. We may decide to let one truck to operate a particular direction for the entire day.

 

Six Sigma

The business will have some quality metrics that need to be improved, but customer satisfaction is given priority. If customers are not satisfied, then we will be doing nothing in the business. We will have to ensure customers feel considered in all of our operations. For our customers to be satisfied, we must provide quality products. How will we ensure our products are of quality? Because we are dealing with fruits and vegetables, all of our farms should apply organic methods in every operation. Clients will find our products healthy; hence, they will be satisfied.

 

We will have an active customer care service. Customers will report their entire requirement to customer care. The customer care will disseminate the conditions to the relevant authorities. The authorities will then have a broader conversation regarding customer requirements (Chau et al. 25). If the authorities are unable to find a solution, the issue is forwarded to the critical management team and finally to the board to provide the way forward.

 

Conclusion

E-grocery is the way to go. We need clients to spend the time they use on visiting grocery stores elsewhere. This idea will help customers in many ways. With E-grocery customers will not encounter long queues to counters; this is the most irritating aspect with in-store grocery in UAE. After doing lots of miles in the store searching for commodities you are subjected to check-out counters. E-grocery will allow their clients to use credit/debit cards which take a few seconds and the process is done.

 

E-grocery will provide comfortable virtual selves & search for its users. Customers will not strain or spend lots of time searching for goods they want since the goods are arranged in classes. Expenses associated with to and fro grocery journeys are cut off; clients will use the time and money used in these visits elsewhere. Impulse buying is also reduced with E-grocery, Clients directly go to what they want, unlike grocery stores. E-grocery will make life so comfortable and easy for customers, watch the space, grocery will be the doorstep.

 

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Works Cited

Morganosky, Michelle A., and Brenda J. Cude. "Consumer response to online grocery shopping." International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 28.1 (2000): 17-26..

Anckar, Bill, Pirkko Walden, and Tawfik Jelassi. "Creating customer value in online grocery shopping." International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 30.4 (2002): 211-220.

Kempiak, Mike, and Mark A. Fox. "Online Grocery Shopping: Consumer Motives, Concerns, and Business Models (originally published in August 2002)." First Monday (2006).

Moses, Sharon J., and LD Dhinesh Babu. "Buyagain Grocery Recommender Algorithm for Online Shopping of Grocery and Gourmet Foods." International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR) 15.3 (2018): 1-17.

Chau, Patrick YK, Grace Au, and Kar Yan Tam. "Impact of information presentation modes on online shopping: an empirical evaluation of a broadband interactive shopping service." Journal of Organizational computing and electronic commerce (2000).

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Created on Jun 25th 2020 04:52. Viewed 233 times.

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