How long does it take to pull an online order?
It is all about the walk path! While we merchandise stores to optimize sales and the shopping experience the setup to pull a $150 online order is not optimized for efficiency. A great walk path can really assist your personal shoppers to not only work more effectively but to reduce mistakes by limiting the time they spend going back and forth. Some best practices for walk path, which we will cover in reverse order so the sequence makes sense:
- Frozen last! Our average order is $130 so pulling frozen last means you don’t need to have a cooler in the cart. Make sure your walk path takes the Frozen cases into account so each subsection (frozen fruit / ice cream / pizza) is in sequence to limit the time searching for products and opening/closing cases. If frozen is in the middle of the store keep it last, just skip those aisles.
- Perimeter of the store, ending near frozen. Work backwards from Frozen to get a good sequence for the perimeter. If your store goes Produce, Deli, Meat, Seafood, Dairy, then Frozen you have a quick way for the shopper to walk the store.
- Center store first – these are the heaviest and easiest to stack items so pulling grocery first is quicker and allows the shopper to be interrupted without having to worry about temperature. The sequence of aisles will come from step 2 as you want to end near the first perimeter section.
- Some rarely ordered and specialty items can be inserted as needed. These typically include front of store, gift cards and dollar sections.
- Take the time to get your walk path optimized for each store and make sure your online grocery platform supports all products being assigned to the path. You should be able to leverage your shelf-tagging efforts to really get the sequence set and optimized to keep your online grocery efficient.
