How to adjust online grocery store to Ramadan

The client

Biobox UAE believes firmly that a life-style with good, wholesome food including top-quality, fresh produce from sustainable and organic sources is what we all need to live strong, make intelligent choices and help our planet at the same time. By cutting out the high energy requirements of a retail outlet, Biobox not only allows customers to save money, but limit the time fresh food is spent in storage thus providing fresher, more delicious choices as well as reducing carbon footprint.

It buys fresh food from smaller producers and manufacturers across these areas, offering customers a single digital storefront from which to choose the freshest meat, poultry and fish, fruit and vegetables, baked goods, cereals, delicatessen and other produce. All the producers are chosen with proximity in mind, so customers can always receive next-day delivery and know the origin of their food. Essentially Lieferladen.de operates as a single shop front for multiple different grocery businesses. 

The store has started in the 2020 pandemic and its online grocery e-commerce operations accelerated dramatically.

Unique challenges in for online grocery e-commerce operations which do not exist in other retail sectors include:

• Price and sell products by weight, not just volume
• Adjust payment when weight in the completed shipment is slightly different to the weight on the original order
• Track perishable stock levels in real time across multiple suppliers
• Be prepared to have multiple orders are picked, packed and shipped at the same time
• Support picking in-store with a seamless integration between the e-commerce website and a suitable back-office system
• Keep a steady number of new users 
• Retain first time buyers
• Make sure that recurring revenue is a the source of most traffic

Prepare a strategy for Ramadan Ecommerce

Based on data, and previous years experience we knew that shopping behavior would radically change during this time of the year and we wanted to prepare in advance. 

Now is the time to introduce Ramadan ready strategies to your ecommerce store by shifting content, promotions and marketing focuses. We knew that this Ramadan, to get the most out of your marketing budget. Our strategy would help shift marketing and promotional spending to 3am-6am, when target audience is awake and shopping. We did not want miss this opportunity to capture new customers by featuring more conservatively dressed models in your homepage images.

4 strategies that worked during Ramadan 

• Shift marketing to 3am
  Boosting Search Engine Marketing, and promotional offers to between 3am-6am. Muslims are waking up and staying up and they are shopping online. Save money from marketing spend (online or offline) during the traditional prime time of 6pm-8pm. Prime time has shifted to the morning. Do not miss the opportunity to capture the new age customers.
• Removed provocative images from homepage
  That doesn’t mean you have to change your whole product to be religiously targeted or non-secular but we used more conservatively dressed models. As a time for family and religious sacrifice, some people would find provocative imagery especially distasteful during Ramadan.
• Rethink bestsellers
  For non-Muslim categories we re-thinked the bestsellers and home product page to reflect UAE values and culture. What sold best the previous month would not necessarily work during Ramadan. We consider products and marketing products focus on family (as packages of several items).
• Feature cheaper / good margin items
  Sites that did not feature lower priced items suffered a hit in conversions. Although most UAE are not very price conscious year round, they are playing with a spike in disposable income from their bonus, thriftiness is a major factor in consumption behavior as we saw. This is a great time of year to get some inventory rolling.

Conclusion

Ecommerce during Ramadan has the potential to be explosive as seen with the amazing shift in behavior as UAE woke up and immediately hit the internet for online shopping. Whether those potential shoppers are captured or not depend fully on strategic timing of marketing and a consciousness of traditional values integrated into product choices and campaigns.

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