What a Small Grocery Store Website Needs

What the site is actually for

Nobody plans a grocery run around a website. But people check one before they go: whether the store is open, whether it has what they need, and whether this week's specials are worth the trip.

For a neighbourhood grocer those questions come from two kinds of shopper. Regulars who live nearby check hours and specials. Newcomers, and people after something particular, want to know what makes the store worth a detour.

The supermarket chains answer these questions with large sites and printed flyers. A small store can answer them with a handful of pages, provided they are kept current.

Kept current is the hard part, and it decides how the site should be built.

The questions shoppers bring

• Are you open now, and on the holiday coming up?
• What is on special this week?
• Do you carry local, specialty or hard-to-find products?
• Can I order by phone, and do you deliver?
• Where do I park, and how close is it?
• Do you take orders for holiday meals and trays?

The first matters most this month. A shopper who cannot tell whether you are open on Boxing Day goes to a store whose site says so.

Hours, and holiday hours

Put the regular hours on every page, in the header or footer, as text rather than in an image.

Holiday hours need a notice of their own, high on the home page, posted a week or two ahead. This year Christmas Day falls on a Friday and Boxing Day on a Saturday, so the usual weekend pattern changes too.

List each holiday plainly, from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day, with its hours or the word closed. Take the notice down when the holidays end.

Change the hours on the Google listing and the Facebook page at the same time, since many shoppers check those before the website.

What makes the store different

A small grocer rarely competes on price across the board. It competes on something the chains do less well: a butcher counter, bread baked on site, produce from nearby farms, an aisle of imported foods, or simply knowing its customers.

Say that plainly on the home page, in a sentence or two, with a real photograph of the counter, the bakery shelf or the produce.

The about page can tell the longer story of the family or the building. The home page needs the reason to shop there.

Local and specialty products

Name the farms, bakeries and producers you buy from, and the specialty lines people cross town for. A short list with a line on each is enough.

People search for these products by name, and a page that names them can be found by shoppers who have never heard of the store.

Avoid promising a full stock list, which will be wrong within a week. Say what you usually carry, and invite people to phone and ask.

This week's specials

Specials are the reason regulars visit the site at all, and the page most often left out of date.

Make it a normal web page, not a scanned flyer or PDF: the dates at the top, such as Wednesday to Tuesday, then the items and prices. It reads on a phone and changes in minutes.

Dates matter more than design. A page that says which week it covers tells shoppers it is current; a page with no dates looks stale even when it is not.

A worked example

A family grocery store on a neighbourhood shopping street has a butcher counter, a small bakery and a produce section supplied partly by two farms an hour away.

Its website showed the hours as a photograph of the door sign, and the specials as a PDF of the printed flyer, updated when someone remembered.

Last Christmas the site showed regular hours through the holidays, and on Boxing Day the phone rang all morning with people asking whether the store was open.

The new site has the hours in text on every page, with a holiday notice a staff member sets each December. The specials page is a simple dated list, updated every Wednesday morning by the person who prices the flyer.

A page on the farms and the butcher counter tells newcomers what the store does differently. Holiday orders for turkeys, hams and party trays have their own page, with the order deadline and a phone number.

Phone orders, delivery and parking

If you take orders by phone, say how: which hours, any minimum, and whether orders are picked up or delivered.

For delivery, list the area, the charge, the days and any cut-off time. Customers who rely on delivery want those details before they call.

Then say where to park: the store's own spaces, the street, or the lot behind. Parking decides many small trips, and nobody should have to phone to ask about it.

Easy enough to update every week

A grocery site lives or dies on whether staff can change it without help. Specials, hours and holiday notices should each be a simple form a staff member fills in, on a page built to receive it.

Choose one person for the weekly update and a fixed time, such as the morning the new specials start. Give them their own login, and keep the job small enough to take ten minutes.

Anything that needs a developer every week will be out of date by the second week.

The counter-case

A store whose specials rarely change, or that has no delivery and a large free lot, can start smaller: hours, holiday hours, what makes it different and how to get there.

A store with nobody to update specials weekly is better off with no specials page than a stale one, and can add it once someone owns the job.

Current hours, though, are not optional. Every grocer needs them right on the site and the listings, holidays included.

What to build first

1. Show regular hours as text on every page.
2. Post holiday hours for this month now.
3. Say what makes the store different on the home page.
4. Name the local producers and specialty lines.
5. Turn the flyer into a dated specials page.
6. Explain phone orders, delivery and parking.
7. Give one person the weekly update.

Step two is the one with a date on it. The hours change more in the next three weeks than at any other time of year, and a site showing the regular ones sends shoppers elsewhere.

The same approach for another business customers check before driving over is in what a lumber yard website needs.

Frequently asked questions

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