Feature Spotlight: Enhanced In-Store Fulfillment & Stock Management Features

FoodStorm is the world’s only built-for-grocery order management system and during peak holiday periods it becomes more important than ever that grocery retailers have the right systems and operations in place to capture the rise in demand. Grocery retailers using FoodStorm to manage their peak holiday season have seen up to a 7x increase in prepared foods and catering sales compared to non-peak holiday catering periods. To ensure FoodStorm is providing the best feature set to help retailers during this extremely busy time, we’re rolling out enhancements to our Pickup Orders Screen and Out-of-Stock features on the FoodStorm storefront for a better online customer ordering experience and retailer fulfillment experience. Continue reading to learn about these valuable updates.

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What are FoodStorm’s Enhanced In-Store Fulfillment and Stock Management Features?

In preparation for Thanksgiving 2024, FoodStorm is enhancing 2 key sets of functionality to help retailers and their customers:

1. Enhancements to our Pickup Orders Screen to make the in-store fulfillment process smoother for team members and customers through payment method upgrades, item completion and Item Note visibility, and last minute order add-ons.
2. FoodStorm storefront enhancements to offer Out-of-Stock functionality to better set customer expectations around stock availability when retailers use our Quantity Limits functionality. This will help customers have a better online ordering experience by communicating real-time quantity limits of key items, such as Thanksgiving turkeys, at their chosen retailer store location, maximize sales by offering customers alternative stores to purchase their desired item(s), as well as give retailers more confidence in their live quantity tracking across items and packs.

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Each of these sets of enhancements provides impactful features for a smoother peak holiday catering season, such as:

‍Pickup Orders Screen Enhancements

• Allow a customer to pay via different payment method than their original, stored credit card without needing to cancel their original order
• Allow a customer to add or delete items from their order on the day of pickup without needing to cancel their original order
• Allow retailer team member to mark specific items in an order as complete and save that information in the order to come back to later
• Allow an option to have orders only be able to be marked ‘complete’ when all items have been marked as ‘complete’
• Ability to see Item Notes via the Pickup Orders Screen to limit errors
• Receive a limited/curated list of search results when looking up an order via Customer Name in the Pickup Orders Screen

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FoodStorm Storefront Out-of-Stock Enhancements

• Allow customers to see whether an item is unavailable at the store they have selected or the store that has been nominated for them before they begin adding items to their basket
• Allow customers to be notified if their chosen fulfillment method is limiting the availability of an item for me (i.e. selecting ‘Delivery’ for fulfillment could show their chosen Turkey size is out of stock, but by selecting ‘Pickup’ they can proceed with their chosen Turkey size order)
• Allow customers to be notified if another store has availability for the item they want to select and be directed through an easy experience to update their store selection if that’s what I’m choosing to do (Pickup only)

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How can FoodStorm’s Enhanced In-Store Fulfillment and Stock Management Features help my grocery prepared foods business?

FoodStorm’s Enhanced In-Store Fulfillment and Stock Management Features help in reducing the need to cancel orders when day-of updates to payment or order items are made, as well as ensuring customers ordering online understand upfront which retailer location has the item(s) they are wanting to order, reducing abandoned carts and lost sales. More specifically, FoodStorm’s Enhanced In-Store Fulfillment and Stock Management Features can help grocery businesses in the following ways:

Pickup Orders Screen Enhancements

• Provides alternate item adding and deleting paths to drive down order cancellations through improved payment options and item add-ons during pickup
• Provides better order fulfillment experience for in-store teams by adding the ability to save completed items in an order for later, and more easily fetch a customer order on the Pickup Orders Screen
• Provides a better order fulfillment experience for customers with Item Notes visible on the Pickup Orders Screen for retailers to follow

FoodStorm Storefront Out-of-Stock Enhancements

• Provides a better online ordering experience for customers by being able to see which retailer stores near them have their desired items, and being able to change their preferred location to ensure they can get their desired item(s), reducing lost sales
• Provide a better business outcome for retailers so they don’t miss out on sales that they could have captured if customers had been presented with an alternative location to fulfill their order

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Own your 2024 holiday catering season with FoodStorm

FoodStorm has almost 20 years of experience in the catering and grocery food service technology industry and has helped hundreds of businesses worldwide transform their operations and streamline their processes. Our team continually develops and delivers industry-leading functionality to ensure our retailers can grow and scale their business with ease, especially during peak times such as annual peak holiday catering seasons.

Contact us today to learn what FoodStorm can do for your business.