Design a grocery store for a dense, urban area.

Understanding Problem

• Sole grocery/supermart -> Just grocery (people can walk in) 
• Offline shopping/online -> Majority offline
• Accessibility -> Open for all 
• Brand chain -> Open, No
• Geography -> Tier 1 city, crowded place
• Dense locality -> majorly houses (4-5 members each house) 
• Interested in architecture or open to other ideas - Open 

Business goal: Experience 

KPI -> Avg Time is taken to complete shopping 

Users: 

3 types of users primarily (buyer, shopkeeper, staff) 

Since experience and revenue are closely tied for buyers, prioritising that 

Buyers: 

• Professionals
• Kids 
• Housewives
• Adults 
• Maids/helpers

User journey (for known grocery stores)

- Travel to the store

- Discovery of items (what to buy) 

• Referring a list / impromptu discovery 

- Picking individual items 

• Getting a cart 
• Carrying the cart

- Checkout Experience 

• Stand in the queue 
• Buy the bag (if not carrying)
• Payment 
• Gate check 
• Exit 

- Carrying back stuff to home 

Thinking about 2,3,4 parts of the journey (experience is touched most there)

Pain points:

• Manually have to walk inside store to select items and checkout 
• If Items are not available, it leads to wastage of time 
• In case of crowd, it becomes very uneasy to stay at the store 
• Sometimes I have to wait for others to free the shopping cart

Prioritised the pain points w.r.t (Impact, Frequency, Relevance to goal) 

Solution: 

Smart Store 

• Users can access inventory through a QR, make the order, make the payment
  • Order is dropped to a central system 
  • Order is mapped to a staff
  • Staff packs up the order and sends it to the pickup counter.
• Allow users to find some parking space for themselves for an order is made.
• Allow users to book a home delivery slot with the order 
  • Users can get the stuff delivered to their home
• Allow users to run online credit with the store 
  • The seller can choose to open a credit line for the user basis on order history and payments.

Prioritised solutions w.r.t (Impact and effort) 

Success metrics:

• % orders happening through QR scan 
• Avg TAT to complete per order (initialisation to handover) 

Risk:

• Trust factor in user’s head 
• Easily replicable
• Missing Physical experience