Like most other industries, the food and beverage industry is rapidly changing. Many supermarkets and grocers got ahead of the game in the early days of ecommerce and quickly expanded to selling online, offering a digital experience for their customers.
But with content-led shopping experiences now dominating online retail, grocery ecommerce has to change again. Some food and beverage brands, stuck with outdated, monolithic systems, are finding this tricky to get right.
Consumer Expectations Have Shifted
Many brands in the food and beverage industry have set up their sites to showcase as much of their catalog as possible. It’s an approach that makes sense: if you have tens or hundreds of thousands of products, you want to be able to get as many of them as possible in front of your customers during the limited time you have their attention.
But consumer expectations are changing, customers have become used to and are demanding a content-led, high-quality experience across all of their digital touchpoints, and they now expect the same when it comes to online grocery shopping.
Grocery retailers who have recognized this new reality can offer customers more personalized, connected experiences. For example, Asda, one of the UK’s big four supermarkets, has invested in cloud-first technology with Salesforce, with Amplience as their experience partner. This technology provides an enhanced view of the customer and facilitates rich customer journeys across all channels.
The Challenges Facing the Food and Beverage Industry
There are two big considerations that businesses in the sector need to address:
Finding a way to stand out from the competition - Both on and offline, there are more ways than ever for people to buy groceries. Giants like Amazon and Walmart have moved into the online grocery space, leveraging their huge fulfillment networks and ecommerce heft to win market share. With so much competition, you need to find a way to differentiate your offering.
Updating your tech stack to meet your customers’ expectations - You need to be able to showcase your products on your site, your app, and on social media. You need to be able to deliver content that demonstrates in rich detail the value of your products, and delivers on brand consistency. If you’re still using a monolithic architecture, you’ll struggle to do this properly. However, with headless commerce, you’ll have increased flexibility, the ability to personalize, and an opportunity to future-proof your business.
How is The Online Grocery Business Evolving to Meet Demand?
Many retailers in the food and beverage industry either have already or are now adopting headless commerce. Separating the backend from the frontend of your ecommerce operation gives you a huge amount of freedom and flexibility. But going headless is just the first step.
Composable commerce is a step further than headless, and unlike with a monolithic platform, a composable architecture brings the best of different technologies and applications together, working to suit your specific business needs.
Going composable means that food ecommerce brands can deliver outstanding digital experiences while still being able to push their core grocery offering. One of the biggest attractions for Asda is the flexibility that it will give them. They can scale their grocery ecommerce platform to match their customer experience ambitions, adapting their approach to respond to industry and customer trends along the way.
How Amplience Can Help to Future-Proof Your Food and Beverage Business
Integrating Amplience into your evolving technology stack will support you with fast content delivery across all digital touchpoints, optimizing assets and media for the intended channel and delivering a consistent brand experience for your customers.
Speed and agility are two key criteria for the rapidly evolving grocery ecommerce space, and by giving marketing and merchandising teams the freedom to make content updates without the need for developer input, Amplience enables agility in responding to both market and business changes.