The biggest FMCG & Convenience delivery challenges (and how to solve them)

Adding a delivery channel to your FMCG brand or grocery/convenience store? Here’s how to overcome your biggest hurdles to success.

Home delivery has moved from retail to restaurants and from the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) market in a big way. Consumers are demanding convenience in every area and now want groceries, cosmetics, snacks, and soft drinks picked, packaged, and delivered at the touch of a button.

Fast-moving goods are moving even faster now – usually on the back of a motorbike – as people worldwide get used to ordering everyday items online for delivery.

FMCG brands, convenience stores, and grocery chains must rapidly adapt to changes in consumer behavior. Some of the biggest brands are starting their own ghost stores optimized for delivery orders. 

Meanwhile, convenience stores increasingly rely on third-party delivery services, and many supermarket chains employ their own fleet of shoppers and drivers to get home delivery orders out as quickly as possible. 

However, this surge in demand exposes the challenges of home delivery in the FMCG world. Adding a new channel to an already complex operation will never be easy. Here we present the six biggest challenges in FMCG delivery and, more importantly, how to solve them with the latest order and delivery management tech.

6 FMCG delivery challenges (and how to solve them)

Tablet madness at the checkout

Store owners are probably familiar with the concept of tablet hell. With so many ordering platforms and delivery partners vying for your business, using several channels to accept orders is common. But when each one provides you with a tablet, things can quickly spiral out of control, and your checkout desk resembles a computer repair shop. 

Switching between tablets is inefficient and error-prone for staff members. Imagine a distribution warehouse with multiple brands, each using multiple delivery partners. It can quickly escalate into a nightmare scenario!

The solution  – push orders directly to POS or use one single tablet

Pushing your orders from every platform straight to your POS avoids the need to switch between tablets. You can stash them out of sight and use one device to manage all your incoming orders. 

Deliverect has integrations with every major delivery player in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere, as well as all the major POS systems. Even if you don’t use a POS to take orders, you can use the Delivery Management App to manage all your orders in one place.

Tedious manual menu management

Menu management is among the most complex sectors for FMCG and grocery brands selling directly to the public via delivery platforms. You might sell products through hundreds or thousands of stores on half a dozen delivery platforms. Imagine having to manually manage updates for all those items on each platform. It could take hours to make a simple change. 

The problem is magnified by the daily price fluctuations for certain items and the thousands of items held in stock for convenience and grocery stores. Changing the prices daily at thousands of stores is not tenable.

The solution – automate menu management in one place

A centralized menu management system allows you to change menus from one screen for multiple locations and platforms. And automate a lot of the tedious manual work. 

Deliverect’s menu management feature, for example, allows you to create menus once and then push them out to all the platforms. Need to update a price or delete an item? Make changes once and push them to every store and platform in one click. 

This allows you to scale to hundreds or thousands of stores without adding much labor to your wage bill. Your staff will thank you, too!

No real-time sales & inventory data

If your inventory data isn’t updated as customers order items, you risk offering items for sale that aren’t available. This leads to canceled orders and a poor customer experience. As mentioned above, you’re dealing with thousands of items, so manually updating stock levels is not scalable. Your staff must snooze an item on each delivery platform’s tablet whenever it is unavailable. Meanwhile, another customer might have already tried to order the item. There must be a better way!

The solution – push real-time inventory data to the delivery platforms 

A system migrating your inventory data to the delivery platforms can automate many tasks.

Deliverect integrates your inventory data to automatically update inventory figures in real time. It can be set to automatically snooze items on all the delivery platforms when unavailable.

Fragmented financial data

When running a large operation across locations and using multiple delivery partners, it’s difficult to get consistent data when needed. It takes time to pull the numbers from all your delivery partners and sort it into one format. 

Without accurate, up-to-date data in a consistent format, you can’t improve operations and make business-critical decisions. This is especially important for large brands operating on a national or even global scale.

Learn more about the Deliverect Analytics Dashboard for business intelligence

The solution – unified financial reporting

If all your delivery partners are integrated with your POS or your ERP, your financial and sales data will already be in your system in one consistent format. That means you know exactly what you sell and how much of it. 

Deliverect gives you actionable insights from all the partners in one dashboard and features specialist reporting tools so you can make the most of this powerful knowledge.

Poor ranking on delivery apps

Standing out on delivery platforms is particularly difficult for grocery stores, convenience stores, and FMCG brands selling directly to consumers, as they typically sell many of the same products. With so many stores entering the delivery game, it’s an extremely competitive space with little to differentiate your store from competitors. 

If customers can’t find your store when browsing a delivery app, they won’t order from you. So, the game's name is to rank highly and appear at the top of the screen. Each delivery partner will have their own priorities in ranking stores, but generally speaking, improving your performance is the way to rank higher.  

The solution – focus on delivery performance

Improve your service to gain a better ranking. Faster delivery times, better reviews, higher acceptance rates, and longer availability hours will all help you rank higher on the delivery apps. 

Automating your key processes—order management, menu management, and inventory management—will all help improve customer service and speed up delivery times. Better performance leads to more sales and an even higher ranking on the apps.

Offer FMCG & grocery delivery at scale with the right automation and order management system

In the complex world of FMCG online ordering, menu and inventory management, achieving success in large-scale operations is near impossible without adding automation and tech integrations.

If your delivery partners, POS, ERP, and/or inventory systems aren’t talking to each other, you waste a lot of time and effort on unnecessary manual tasks and don’t get the real-time data you need to make critical decisions and optimize.

Deliverect has developed the tools to help you take control of delivery operations, whether you are an FMCG brand delivering direct-to-consumer or a grocery or convenience chain adding delivery to stores at scale.

Learn more about how Deliverect connects your systems and gets you on the road to FMCG delivery management success.