Taking the stress out of online grocery shopping.

About the client

Say hello to Cartdrop, the shoppable list app designed to take the stress out of online grocery shopping. Make, share and save your lists as you move through the world. When it’s time to buy, we seamlessly match items in your cart with the best stores for delivery or pickup.

Opportunity

Online grocery shopping is a tough business. Grocery stores routinely have more than 20,000 SKUs and every retail store has different assortments of products, not to mention wildly inconsistent inventory management systems. Then, to make grocery even more challenging, many grocery stores are regional! Over the last 10 years, many companies have attempted to create online ordering solutions but most of the time their progress is limited due to the massive data normalization challenge across retailers. There have been two primary approaches for online grocery:

1. Retailer solutions. Many retailers will create digital offerings that make it easy for their customers to shop. This makes sense because these retailers control their inventory and can create solutions using this data. Most of the time these services will focus on “curbside pickup” because the missing component for “at home delivery” is the drivers (and that is expensive). To make these solutions more problematic, customers will routinely shop at more than one retailer to get everything they need for their family. A customer might shop at Kroger to save money for most of their products but then buy meats and vegetables at Whole Foods for a higher quality product. Retail solutions will always plateau at this point because retailers have no incentive to have a shared product offering with other retailers.

2. Gig economy solutions. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart – these companies’ primary assets are the workforce of gig workers and their digital platforms that make it easy to coordinate small jobs (like grocery delivery). Instacart is a major contender in this space, but they struggle with bias as well: they have to prioritize their experience for efficiency. Instacart struggles to guarantee brands that a customers wants in stores (if there is a specific brand of tomato you want…good luck). You’re also typically limited to a specific store’s inventory and the entire experience is built around this.

These options force customers to give up choice for the sake of convenience. CartDrop aims to fix this.

Solution

Put the customer in control of what they want to purchase. Design a mobile experience that focuses on saving users time while allowing product control through an opinionated and delightful list building experience not hand-cuffed to fulfillment with a single vendor.

Customers and CPG brands are aligned on needs. Brands are struggling with the existing solutions for online grocery shopping because it disrupts the way they have operated. For decades, brands have had predictable ways of launching new products through in-store promotion, end-caps, favorable planograms and more. But now, many of the shoppers in stores are gig workers shopping on behalf of online customers – they can’t make the same impulse buys.

The goal of CartDrop is to deliver a frictionless and intelligent shopping solution that has the user’s best interest at heart. One key experience mechanic was the discovery of the “Drop.”

As you can see below, research showed that users need ultra-simple ways to build shopping lists and to remember products. CartDrop’s scanning function is just that. By simply scanning a UPC code, the system will automatically identify the product and help the user organize it into their shopping lists. It will even keep track of where that product can be purchased. Think of it as a “Shazam” for products – never forget a product or brand that you want.

Results

The CartDrop app is still in early phases having just released an alpha, but initial feedback is promising. Re-orienting an entire ecosystem is going to be a massive undertaking, but the CartDrop team enthusiastically and tirelessly believes in prioritizing people, society and the planet will drive relentless product relevancy and long-term value.

App Reviews (iOS):

“When I or my wife find something new we like or run out of something, we scan it with Cartdrop and add it to the shopping list so we don’t forget it. We choose Kroger delivery over Instacart. Kroger delivery has been on time. I think it comes straight from their warehouse. The produce is so much better than Instacart, and they don’t upcharge like Instacart. Kroger even recycles the shopping bags! I reward myself for not going to the store by going for a bike ride. I must save at least an hour a week!”

“My wife and I have recently started using this app to do our grocery shopping. It has saved us so much time and has made getting our groceries so much easier. I used to go to the grocery store and spend so much time looking for items. This app lets you simply create a list on your phone and keep it saves for later. My wife and I add or scan the items we want. Greatest shopping app that I have used!”

“There’s so many shopping solution apps out there, but that’s exactly the problem. There’s too many of them and none of them talk to each other. It just creates more work in the end. CartDrop is what every busy person and family needs to make the house function without drama. It’s brilliant!!”

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