Online grocery store with local delivery, by zone and time slot

When you deliver from an online grocery store within the same town, you are really selling two things: the goods and the time they arrive. Tomatoes, telemea cheese and home-baked bread cannot wait in a courier depot, and the person ordering them wants to know they will get them tomorrow, between certain hours.

A grocer usually starts out with orders taken by phone and on social media, written down in a notebook. It works up to a point; then come the forgotten orders, the product promised twice and the trips made for a single jar.

Delivery zones and time slots with limited capacity

We draw the zones around the way you deliver, not around administrative boundaries: neighbourhoods, nearby villages, a ring around the shop. In Romania, postcodes are rarely entered correctly, so we prefer to have the buyer pick their neighbourhood or village from a list. Each zone has its own delivery charge and the days on which you go there.

Time slots have a capacity. If the van can make a certain number of stops between two times, the store closes the slot when it is full and offers the next one. Orders that come in after the cut-off time move automatically to the next delivery day.

• Zones with their own rate and days: for example, the town every day, the surrounding villages twice a week.
• Collection in store: free of charge, with a choice of day and time.
• Route sheet: the day’s orders, grouped by zone and time slot.

Weight, perishables and stock that runs out by lunchtime

Cheese cut from the block, cold meats and olives are sold by weight, and the actual piece never comes out at exactly what the customer asked for. The buyer chooses a quantity in increments you set, and sees the price per kilogram and an estimated total. After weighing, you enter the actual weight on the order and the total is recalculated.

This raises a payment question. On delivery, in cash or by card, you simply take the final amount. For online payment, the clean route is to place a hold on an amount large enough to cover the order and to take the actual amount after weighing, which is possible only if the payment processor you choose has this function; otherwise you are left with pre-packed pieces of fixed weight.

Perishables have low stock and a short life. Bread is baked on certain days, dairy arrives from the producer once a week. Each product can have its own availability days and a stock level per delivery day, and the basket warns the buyer when a product cannot arrive on the chosen day.

Online grocery store: what goes on the product page

For food sold at a distance, the buyer must be able to read, before ordering, broadly what they would see on the label in the shop. The exact list of mandatory particulars and the way allergens are written are not for us to decide: you check them with a food safety consultant or with the veterinary and food safety authority.

Our part is to make room for them, in separate fields rather than in one jumbled block of text. That way, allergens look the same on every product and are quickly corrected when a recipe changes.

• Name, net quantity and price per unit of measure (per kilogram or per litre).
• Ingredients, with the allergens highlighted.
• Storage conditions and the approximate shelf life remaining at delivery.
• The producer and the place of origin, which for local produce is the selling point itself.

The minimum order and the missing product

The minimum order exists so that delivery does not cost more than the goods. We set it by zone: lower close to the shop, higher for outlying villages. The basket shows in good time how much is still needed to reach the threshold.

The basket is also where the question that saves the most phone calls is asked: what should happen if a product is missing? The buyer chooses between a substitution with something similar, removing the product from the order or a call from you.

Starting with a single zone, and the tools behind it

A store with its own delivery is tested on the street, not just on the screen. We recommend starting with a single zone and part of the range, with real orders from people close to you, before telling the whole town.

The store sits on WooCommerce, the e-commerce plugin for WordPress, which already has delivery zones and local pickup. We add slots with capacity, sale by weight and stock by day through extensions or through our own code. If you deliver rarely and only a few products, a well-made order form can be enough.

• The opening questions: how you deliver today, how many stops a van can make, which products cause headaches.
• The zones, slots and basket rules, checked with real addresses.
• Payments and documents: cash or card on delivery, card online, till receipt or invoice, agreed with your accountant.

This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.