Fresh groceries delivered in Norway
LOKALGROSSIST.NO is the local grocery delivery and pickup service for fresh high-quality food in the region of Stavanger in Norway. The motto is ‘LOKALGROSSIST.NO makes it easy to choose locally’.
LOKALGROSSIST.NO was founded at the end of 2018 and has been online since Summer 2019. The grocery delivery service is serving both B2C and B2B customers and offers also pickup of groceries in the widely dispersed population of the region Rogaland in the West of Norway.
The grocery delivery service is run as an online pure player, there is no physical store. End customers order online until 15:00 hours in the afternoon for delivery on the next morning or afternoon. Most of the goods ordered by end customers are sourced fresh from local suppliers.
Sourcing of fresh groceries from local suppliers
As LOKALGROSSIST.NO wanted to stand out of the crowd from the beginning with an assortment of healthy, natural and sustainable produced products the integration of local suppliers from Western Norway was extremely important. This requirement is actually a core feature of the SAAS Grocery Commerce Cloud as part of the order cycle management and pick-pack-ship process. Customers can order in the online shop of the delivery service until 15:00 hours in the afternoon and immediately thereafter, the system creates and sends automatically supplier orders. Suppliers pick their groceries with these orders based on the SAAS Wave Picking algorithm and deliver to LOKALGROSSIST.NO. Here, all the goods of the different suppliers are packed together using the SAAS Back-Office. After the packing process, orders are ready for delivery directly to customers or to pickup stations.
Pickup stations for fresh groceries
Rogaland in Western Norway is an area with widely spread settlements. In addition to that, there are a lot of weekend- and holiday-houses. Therefore it is not very efficient to offer daily delivery to such areas – the cost for the last mile delivery would just be too high.
To create a good balance between delivery costs and customer service, LOKALGROSSIST.NO decided to offer pickup from several pickup stations in the widespread countryside of Western Norway. Customers can choose their closest pickup station in the checkout of the online shop. This solution makes everybody happy. The end customers get fresh local groceries close to their houses and LOKALGROSSIST.NO saves money for the delivery service. The reason is that with the combined delivery of several customer orders to one pickup station, LOKALGROSSIST.NO can drastically reduce cost for the last mile.
Special delivery service features for fresh groceries
When selling fresh groceries online, there are a number of very important requirements to consider. Some products may not be available on certain days of the week, for example sourdough bread with long dough making process. Another special feature is the management of lead-times for such products that need to be prepared as for example fresh fish that has to be caught first. Especially the latter is a very important one in Norway.
When it comes to packaged products, there are some aspects that need to be considered in a grocery delivery service. To avoid orders that consist only of heavy beverages with little margin, retailers can limit the maximum order quantity certain products. The same is possible the other way round in terms of a minimum order quantity per product – think of bread rolls that need to be pre- packaged and labeled in a paper bag. Whether there is just one roll in a bag or there are five – the effort is the same, but the resulting gross margin quintuples.
Needless to mention are weight articles. Some of these groceries are bought by piece and charged by weight, for example a whole fish, others are also ordered by weight, think of a fish fillet.
The SAAS Grocery Commerce Cloud handles all of these very specific features that are needed to run a delivery or pickup service for fresh or packaged groceries.
LOKALGROSSIST.NO was looking for a system that was quick to deploy, easy to use and prepared for further growth. With the Grocery Commerce Cloud, SAAS can offer a solution that needs no IT expertise, no software installations and only little training. Special attention was also paid to localisation and customer specific features. This includes the online shop in Norwegian as well as the leading national payment provider Nets/DIBS in Norway.
Jo Åge Undheim, Founder and Managing Director of LOKALGROSSIST.NO:
‘We are really glad that we can offer so many local high-quality groceries online and deliver them to our customers. SAAS has been very supportive since the beginning of this project and the standardisation of the delivery service processes really help us a lot.’
Key Facts of the Norwegian grocery delivery and pickup service
• Grocery delivery and pickup service in the region Rogaland in West Norway
• Online pure player without stationary store
• Servicing both private households (B2C) and organisations (B2B)
• Pickup stations in the widely spread settlement of the region
• Wide range of locally grown, produced or manufactured products, freshly sourced• Ordering until 15:00 hours in the afternoon for delivery on the next morning
• Picking of goods in co-operation with producers and manufacturers of the region• Integration of Nets/DIBS as the leading payment service provider in Norway
• Weekday schedule and lead time management for certain fresh products