Design a grocery store for a dense, urban area.
- Flavia Bergstein
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

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