If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time looking at how Amazon does business. And for good reason. Amazon seemingly sells everything under the sun and they have been the standard for e-Commerce innovation since–well, since e-Commerce has existed. To me, their genius is in getting you to pay more than you would elsewhere, just because you like it so much. The experience is so easy, so trustworthy, so low-risk, and so time-efficient that you don’t even think about shopping elsewhere.
So, I have found a shopping experience that has innovations that I haven’t even seen at Amazon. Or at least I haven’t noticed them at Amazon. And I don’t know if others have them, but I haven’t seen them. And this cutting-edge shopping experience is in (drum roll, please)… groceries!
Disappointed? I mean what can you do with groceries? Turns out that if you think about, there are some interesting ideas. The ideas I want to show you today are from Peapod, the online grocery service owned by the brick and mortar Stop ‘n Shop chain of supermarkets.
I won’t show you all of the interesting ideas in that Peapod shopping experience–just two. The first one is something that many businesses could do. In fact, any business that has regular, repeat business–kind of a supplies replenishment business:
Think about all the companies that could do this. Any company for whom customers build up a regular order history could use this. Amazon has an ability to do a standing order for supplies so that they come every two months or whatever, but it handles each item separately and I have always found it hard to use. The Peapod approach works much better for me.
And here is one that works well for the grocery business, but I could imagine using it for restaurants or take-out orders, too:
To me, this is genius. Now, it has to actually deliver on the promise, and you could see it being expected a great deal to cover other situations, such as or vegetarian (which right now you deal with by creating your own custom plan), but you get the idea. This is a powerful way to make shopping easier and keeps people coming to Peapod.
So, what about you? Have you thought about how you make your customer’s experience so easy that they never think about going anywhere else? If you don’t, your competitor will.
