Start a grocery delivery shop

Slots are the product

Delivery slots with capacity, cut-off times and closed days are what turn a pile of orders into a route. When Saturday morning fills, it closes itself instead of overselling by forty baskets.

• Capacity per slot and per day
• Cut-off time for same-day orders
• Different slots per zone
• Days off, holidays and one-off closures

Zones instead of courier rates

Local delivery zones carry their own prices and minimum order values. Pickup from the shop is a separate option. Neither one is a courier rate wearing a different name, and neither picks up surcharges written for parcels.

A large catalogue that stays usable

Thousands of items need search that forgives spelling, filters that mean something, and bulk edits for price and stock. Imports and exports work on the whole catalogue, not one product at a time, so a supplier price list is an afternoon rather than a week.

• Search with typo tolerance and synonyms
• Bulk price and stock edits across the catalogue
• CSV import and export of everything
• Stock per warehouse when you have more than one

Dates on everything

Batch tracking with expiry dates stops expired stock from selling and tells you which orders a batch reached if it has to be withdrawn. In grocery that is not a nice-to-have; it is the thing an inspector asks about.

The same basket, every week

Grocery is the most repetitive catalogue there is. A customer who can reorder last week’s basket in one action orders more often than one who has to rebuild it from scratch, and a subscription on the staples takes the decision away entirely.

Loyalty points cost you less than the discount you would otherwise give to keep someone from switching.

Paid at the door, and counted honestly

Where groceries are paid in cash at the door, cash on delivery is a built-in payment method with its own fee, limits and risk score — not an add-on charged by the month.

Profit is counted on orders that were actually delivered, with product cost included, because in a thin-margin business the difference between ordered and delivered is the whole business.

Read more: Cash on delivery, built in — with fraud protection, See your store live.