Is Grocery Shopping - A Whole New Way - Coming to a Grocer Near You?

Grocery Shopping – A Whole New Way – is not just a tag line, it is reflective of the times, the available technologies and the desire of consumers to make grocery shopping more facile, less time consuming and location independent. It is enabling the grocery retailer to reach their “loyal” customers the way no plastic card, weekly newspaper circular or website can do.

There are more than 270 million cell phones in the U.S. today. By 2012, it is projected that 150 million of those cell phones will have mobile applications performing personal and mobile commerce tasks like grocery shopping.

Technology is an enabler. It provides the capability to accomplish things in new and different ways but it takes people with vision to harness that technology to create new and better solutions to old problems.

Grocery shopping has always been a chore. It is repetitive and time consuming – time that could be better spent doing more important things, at work, with family or just enjoying the peace and quiet.

Many attempts have been made to automate the shopping experience, some by enterprising software companies and others by retailers themselves. While each offers some improvement, not one has brought all the pieces together into a cohesive solution, until now.

HHappe, Inc., has developed a cohesive solution with a product called Shop ‘n Stock, and as the name implies it effectively integrates all of the shopping activities, from consumption to replenishment into a single application that runs on the consumers’ mobile phone.

With Shop ‘n Stock the consumer is fully empowered to shop anytime, anywhere and the grocery retailer is also capable of communicating with their customers anytime, anywhere. Can such a change be implemented overnight? No. Change is a process of successive approximation. It will take several factors for grocery shopping – A Whole New Way – to become a reality. There needs to be broad consumer use and the recognition by retailers that mobile commerce is a viable business channel that must be exploited. That is why Shop ‘n Stock is available today but designed for the future!

Recent history provides us with two equivalent scenarios of the introduction of change, “universal credit cards”, e.g., MasterCard, Visa and email. Both were revolutionary changes to the way things were done. But at introduction both of these phenomena had limited use. Initially universal credit cards were only accepted in a few places. Consumer use caused more and more commercial enterprises to honor them until critical mass was reached and universal cards became the rule versus the exception.

The advent of email followed a similar path. It entered the public consciousness with a whimper not a bang. There was no infrastructure to support its use beyond the confines of a company. So at first it simply became a replacement for the interoffice memo. When Internet technology became available to the masses, email could now be sent to anyone, anytime and the rest is history.

Major changes start off with a whimper not with a bang. Change occurs because there has been pent-up unarticulated demand just waiting for the confluence of events to make it possible.

Grocery shopping – A Whole New Way – using mobile phone technology, linking shoppers and retailers together like never before for their mutual benefit, has the potential to change the grocery shopping experience the way supermarkets changed the shopping experience, the way the introduction of UPC codes changed the shopping experience and more recently, the way Internet has change the shopping experience. Mobile commerce is the next big change agent.

Some retailers may initially resist the change, concerned that by supporting this capability they would be providing a tool for their loyal customers to shop at other stores. It is a legitimate concern. However, because shopping applications will abound, their customers will be using their mobile phones to shop, therefore it seems more prudent to embrace the technology and leverage it, rather than to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and allow their competitors the competitive advantage.

Today, there are more than a thousand grocery shopping applications available on one or more mobile platforms including, iPhone, Google, et al. None are presently linked to retailers. Only one manages the entire grocery shopping cycle, from consumption through replenishment. And only one is positioned to provide the full range of retailer services. That product is called Shop ‘n Stock.

For more information on Shop ‘n Stock go to: www.shop-n-stock.com