Trilogi (TLG) has developed and implemented MYDMART, an online supermarket in China owned by a supermarket chain specializing in imported food, with physical stores in Beijing and Tianjin.
MYDMART, an online supermarket with imported products
MYDMART’s CEO, David Du 杜铁源, a Chinese-born entrepreneur educated in Europe, built the project on a well-defined premise: making it easy for foreigners living in China to buy international products. Du located his physical stores in areas with a dense Western population interested in this kind of food, such as the universities of Beijing and Tianjin, where students were already a reliable audience.
Watching market trends and with all his supplier contacts in place, David Du 杜铁源 explored selling his full range of products online to reach more potential customers. A consulting session with Trilogi’s (TLG) development team was key to defining the overall project. The process identified the business’s strengths, such as having two warehouses in distant locations that could streamline order distribution based on the end customer’s proximity. Among other parameters, the consulting work also laid the groundwork for the store design and defined the main guidelines the eCommerce platform should follow to provide a good shopping experience for the end consumer.
Online supermarkets arrive in Europe
For Trilogi, opening an online supermarket like MYDMART, with more than 5,000 products, lets us take on new challenges in the food sector, where we already had omnichannel experience with the organic supermarket BioSpace.
Online grocery is taking hold in Europe, as the latest news from Amazon, Mercadona and Lidl shows. Amazon Fresh officially launched in England this June and is still working on its online supermarket in Spain, which remains in beta. Lidl also announced its third online launch this week, in the Netherlands, after Germany and Belgium. And in Spain, supermarket chain Mercadona announced plans to open a new online store in 2017, as reported in this article from Ecommerce-news.
But it’s not only the big companies opening up the digital food market: the new generation of consumers opens new prospects for brands, which will need to explore how to win the loyalty of customers who use other channels and have new expectations.
New consumers, new expectations
According to Ecommerce-news, the average online basket in Spain is 70 euros, compared with 30 euros in physical stores. In some cases the difference can be up to five times greater. Consumers break down as follows: 50% are young people aged 20 to 35, another 30% are aged 36 to 55, and those over 55 make up 17% of online shoppers.
The advantages of online supermarkets seem clear: convenience, time savings, variety and price. The challenges: website usability, trust in the quality of fresh food and better customer service. New consumers also want to see more product information, such as ingredients and 360º photos, not to mention the ability to reload recurring shopping carts.
Every project developed at Trilogi is unique and special. MYDMART meant diving into the food sector from an international perspective and in a vast market like China. A challenge for our R&D team, which used LogiCommerce to meet the functional needs of an online supermarket.
Image rights: joveneseuropeos, andnowuknow
