Online grocery stores need the best possible platform, user interface, and internal systems to run a successful company. With the help of the best grocery ecommerce platforms available, brands around the globe have been able to build and scale their online grocery businesses.
In the United States alone, the grocery ecommerce industry is worth over $100 billion, and this figure rises every year. To accommodate this growing sector, businesses need comprehensive tools at their disposal. To point you in the right direction, we’ll outline the leading ecommerce grocery platforms and why clients love them.
We’ll cover:
- Wave Grocery - Best for grocery ecommerce
- BigCommerce - Best for large-scale businesses
- Shopify - Best for analytics and metrics
- WooCommerce - Best for smaller businesses
- Weebly - Best for cost-effective store creation
- Wix - Best for rapid editing.
- Big Cartel - Best for small ecommerce sites
- Squarespace - Best for new businesses
Wave Grocery
Wave Grocery is the top user-rated grocery platform currently available, providing an accessible and streamlined route for grocery sellers to get started in the ecommerce realm. Specifically created for grocery stores, this is the number one choice of brands looking to launch into the digital world. Wave Grocery focuses on allowing supermarkets to turn their physical stores into online storefronts as quickly as possible with a diverse array of features.
Out of all of the ecommerce giants on this list, Wave Grocery is the only one that specifically focuses on delivering a flawless experience to supermarket brands. While the larger scale of brands like Shopify is an advantage, their generality also converts into a weakness. Wave Grocery overcomes this by focusing on one sector, providing a streamlined experience for grocery brands that are looking to transfer into a hybrid digital-physical business model.
Wave Grocery has a number of features that allow for rapid scaling for grocery brands. Its machine learning and AI systems work to boost ecommerce personalization, helping to provide customized product recommendations and replacements for customers. Additionally, the central order logging platform offers a comprehensive behind-the-scenes ordering and inventory management system for businesses, helping to streamline operations. With both web and native mobile platforms, Wave Grocery creates a comprehensive system that any supermarket can take advantage of, offering a suite of admin panels, picker applications, and other holistic systems that help both users and supermarket owners.
By introducing a loyalty module into supermarkets, Wave Grocery helps brands to build, sustain, and expand their audiences with ease. Over time, this can help to increase customer retention and drive bottom-line improvements for grocery brands. This feature is just one of the many innovative structures that Wave Grocery builds into its platform, with smart slot inventory management, out-of-stock replacement suggestions, shopping lists, local product collections, and more all just a click away.
Another impressive aspect that sets Wave Grocery out from its competitors is the advanced support it offers to partners. Instead of being a drop in the ocean of larger companies like Shopify, Wave Grocery focuses on delivering a white-glove service, taking time to offer dedicated support to all supermarkets on its platform. This, combined with the extensive and dynamic features it offers, makes it a leading platform for e-grocery platforms.
For businesses that are looking to scale their grocery platform, Wave Grocery supports dynamic and expanding digital networks with complex inventories. With an easy-to-use system that has a big payoff, it’s clear to see why this platform has cultured such an avid following in the ecommerce grocery platform space.
Best for: Grocery businesses that want a specialized, highly-functional, and ecommerce-first partner to launch an e-grocery platform.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a leading ecommerce storefront provider in the space, that’s made a name for itself by serving enterprise-level clients. It offers a range of specific services, spanning across B2B, wholesale, multi-storefront, international, and commerce-as-a-service environments. Its large-scale flexibility is partly the reason that it has become so popular with a diverse range of larger businesses.
The BigCommerce platform focuses on giving power to the user, giving them a lot of freedom when it comes to creating and customizing their ecommerce store. They include a page builder, theme customization suite, and even checkout customization window. Behind the scenes, their range of storefront conversion tools will help ecommerce businesses to optimize their approach to selling.
While not focused directly on the grocery ecommerce sphere, its range of tools, systems, and even API integrations allow businesses to get started fairly easily. Their integrations with WordPress and other channels make it a great option for brands that are already running a successful storefront and want to expand into new territory.
Best for: Large-scale businesses that are looking to capture larger audiences and expand both in terms of scale but also into new markets.
Shopify
For much of the past decade, Shopify has been the single largest ecommerce platform, representing businesses in over 170 countries. Earlier, we commented on the large market that ecommerce currently sustains, with Shopify representing over 10% of all of the ecommerce income in the States.
With billions of dollars flowing through Shopify and millions of merchants worldwide, it’s no wonder that Shopify is the first grocery ecommerce platform that people think of. It offers a high degree of flexibility, allowing business owners to drag and drop new modules onto their websites.
Another advantage of Shopify is that they offer an in-depth conversion and analytics suite, which helps you to optimize your store as you go. If you have lots of supermarket products, this can help you discover trends and ensure you’re stocked up for the future.
Best for: Businesses that are looking to partner with a name-brand company and prioritize analytics, with the budget to do so.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress, which is still the #1 blogging platform in the world. If you’re already familiar with how WordPress works, then making a leap to WooCommerce will be a walk in the park. Although WordPress is primarily a content management system, its range of integrations allows it to serve grocery delivery apps effectively.
Their platform is hierarchical, allowing businesses to rapidly and sequentially create product categories and populate them with information. As an open-source platform, there is an active community of developers that will provide help in the forums if you run into any problems.
WooCommerce focuses on the selling aspect of grocery ecommerce as much as possible. It offers a range of themes that you can use to rapidly start a new store, but puts more focus on growing your audience and communicating with them. While their lack of flexibility is off-putting for some brands, others enjoy the additional structure that it can offer to online supermarkets.
Woo typically has rapid load speeds and various payment plans, both of which help smaller businesses take advantage of the platform.
Best For: Companies that want to expand further into this area and already have an established blog presence on WordPress.
Weebly
Weebly is an internationally renowned website-building tool that has hosted hundreds of thousands of ecommerce stores over the years. Weebly is a very simple site, allowing business owners to rapidly create a new store and customize it to their liking. However, while there is a large selection of templates and potential store designs, the depth of features that Weebly offers pales compared to others on this list.
However, while not the most technologically advanced of the ecommerce platforms, it is one of the most cost-effective. Weebly offers a $ 10-a-month plan, with the option to push this figure down even further when subscribing to plans for longer periods of time. Weebly also offers a free domain and SSL to everyone on its platform.
Weebly is very effective at inventory management, making it a good choice when working with grocery ecommerce brands. However, the lack of features means that while customers can see and interact with products, they won’t have the same range of features like making wish lists or creating recurring shopping orders.
Best For: Weebly is a cost-effective solution for business owners looking to expand into a digital space. However, that cost comes at a reduced number of user features.
Wix
For years, Wix focused their marketing content and materials around customization. Their biggest selling point was offering customers a way of diversifying from their competitors, their drag-and-drop system allowing absolutely anyone to create a website. Wix has a huge amount of customization available, with its stunning array of templates allowing you to get a jump start on creating the perfect store for you.
For those looking to create a grocery ecommerce platform, you should take note that Wix limits website storage to 50GB. For many larger grocery platforms, this could reduce the number of marketing automations or analytics tracking data points that you’re able to regularly compute. If you want to go beyond this 50GB limit, you will incur much larger monthly fees to work with Wix.
Another factor to consider is that Wix is notoriously difficult to transfer a site on and off. If you’ve designed your site with Wix, you’ll find a real challenge when trying to move your site to another provider down the line. With that in mind, we recommend that you’re absolutely sure you want to commit to Wix before starting an account with them.
Best For: Those looking for a drag-and-drop system that allows you to rapidly create an ecommerce store.
Big Cartel
Big Cartel is an extremely affordable option for those looking to start an online ecommerce business. There are a number of different plans available, some of which will allow you to create a store completely for free. Big Cartel was specifically created for artists to share their work and bring in more views to their content. Due to this, many of their customized shop templates and plans are highly customizable and very aesthetically pleasing.
However, Big Catel increases its price as you add more products. For stores that don’t have many products to offer, this makes them a fantastic choice. However, for companies looking to start a grocery ecommerce platform, this may not be the best choice.
Big Cartel offers a number of integrations into social media sites and other marketing channels. For example, you can create a link between Facebook, Instagram, and a Big Cartel store, creating designated marketing channels for customers to encounter your products on. It has integrated sales tracking features and will help entrepreneurs with automated sales tax calculations and other invoice strategies.
Best For: New stores that only have a few products or are looking to get started without investing lots of capital.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a highly-flexible website builder that offers an impressive range of integrations. What lends Squarespace to the grocery ecommerce world is the fact that it allows businesses to sell an unlimited number of products. Especially for businesses that are looking to expand their offerings, this flexibility in terms of customization and publishing products is extremely effective.
There are a number of different plans on Squarespace, each of which offers a different range of features. If you already have a brick-and-mortar store, then Squarespace has packages that will help you to transition into the online world. Part of this transition is analytics, with Squarespace offering an impressive suite of analytical tools to monitor your store.
Another area where Squarespace excels is within marketing automation. From the business manager page, you are able to create automatic email chains or email notifications when a customer completes a certain action. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, you create an automatic system that reaches out to them.
One important aspect of Squarespace to note for business owners is that they charge a 3% transaction fee unless you have their more expensive monthly plans. If you are not careful, this could be a major setback for business owners.
Best For: Smaller companies that are only just starting to get sales and want to move onto an online platform with more visibility.
Final thoughts
The brands on this list represent the very best grocery ecommerce platforms for businesses in 2024 and beyond. Whether you’re looking for a household brand that has a huge number of integrations or a grocery-specific ecommerce platform, there will be something for absolutely everyone.
By reading through each of the brands, you’ll be able to deduce which of the best grocery ecommerce platforms is best for you. From there, you can select a platform, create an account, and start building and scaling your ecommerce grocery storefront.
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