Flexible online buYing: a Slingshot innovation
Posted by Maryneidy Arocha-Santiago on September 17, 2012
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When online grocery shopping really took off, around 2004, it was seen as the next big thing. Consumers were fascinated with the idea of hassle free shopping.
Then the novelty of shopping groceries online started to fade as people realised that it took them a lot of time to fill up their baskets, perhaps more than they would have spent if they had gone to the physical shop. At least, they knew more or less where things were physically located. In addition, it was the nightmare of organising the delivery. People also realised that they were missing-out on the great promotions or the new products.
Since then some things have changed (e.g. more delivery slot options, free delivery, etc.) and many people continue shopping online. However, consumers are not really being wooed by the online experience offered by grocery retailers. It’s still tedious and time consuming. Unless you have the exact name of the variety of the product you want or its code, browsing for it is not really easy as you have to go through long list of small visuals of similar products.
However the online shopping experience for groceries may be about to change now with slingshotshopping.com – a new platform that promises to make shopping easier and more fun.
Slingshot basically allows you to add products to your existing online shopping basket from many places. You could add a product from a facebook page, pintisterest or any page as you see them in day-to-day life while browsing the Internet – meaning that you don’t longer seem to have to browse the entire site of Tesco.com or Ocado.com (or the website of the online grocery retailer you use) to look for a specific product.
The advantage for retailers, on the other hand, is that Slingshot facilitates impulse purchasing, so their sales could go up. Slingshot is already working with the bigger online grocery retailers in the UK – Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Ocado – and is keen on adding more retailers to its platform. It has been tipped as one of top 10 start-ups in the world right now by Forbes, TechRadar and PepsiCo.
This is definitely a space that all (not only grocery retailers) need to watch out for.
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