Are you a grocery retailer failing to minimize your cost per delivery and maintain healthy profits? Does poor visibility make it hard to track and avoid delivery delays and exceptions? Do you find it challenging to meet your daily grocery delivery targets and timelines? If yes, it’s time to implement grocery delivery software. Online grocery delivery software helps simplify your business operations to meet your customer demands, minimize delivery costs, and maximize profit margins. But with several grocery delivery software solutions out there, finding the right option for your business can be tough. So, we’ve got you this blog that covers how a grocery delivery platform can help businesses, key features to look for, and the 10 best grocery delivery software solutions you can pick from. Table of Contents Benefits of Advanced Grocery Delivery Software Key Features of Grocery Delivery Software Top 10 Grocery Delivery Software Options for Your Business FAQs Grocery Delivery Software: Key to Enhancing Your Operations Benefits of Advanced Grocery Delivery Software Grocery delivery software empowers you to enhance all your grocery delivery processes, including order management, delivery scheduling and dispatching, driver tracking, and customer communication. Some advantages of implementing a grocery delivery system include: Reduce operational costs Most online grocery software for route planning comes with built-in route optimization and dynamic routing capabilities. Businesses can use it to create the most efficient delivery routes and reduce vehicle idling, empty miles, backtracking, and costly detours. It, thus, decreases fuel and vehicle maintenance costs, improving profit margins. Enhanced productivity Online grocery delivery software lets a grocery business create efficient routes to accommodate more deliveries per journey, reducing trips and increasing productivity. Moreover, it provides insights into delivery performance metrics, such as completed or missed deliveries and on-time delivery rates to identify and eliminate performance issues with informed measures. Enables scaling of business operations Online grocery software helps automate processes, such as order taking, route optimization, scheduling, route dispatch, and customer communications via delivery notifications. Thus, it helps automate delivery-related processes to handle increasing order volumes efficiently. This way, businesses can scale their business operations without compromising efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. Integrates with existing business systems Advanced online grocery delivery software provides integration with your existing business platforms, including warehouse management software, transportation management software, enterprise resource planning, or third-party logistics solutions. It helps you establish connected workflows and streamline different aspects of your delivery business. Key Features of Grocery Delivery Software While the exact features you need in grocery software can vary based on your business-specific needs, you can always look for essential features as follows. Quick and accurate order import Manual order entry is time-consuming and error-prone, especially if you handle on-demand deliveries where order volumes keep fluctuating. Hence, you must look for software that allows importing orders straight from an Excel spreadsheet, point-of-sale software or order management software. It won’t only help you reduce your time but also eliminate manual errors, improving accuracy and efficiency. Delivery scheduling and route optimization If you deliver orders based on your customers’ preferences or priorities and ensure on-time delivery, it will help boost your credibility. So, your software must let you schedule deliveries based on your customers’ preferred time slots and create the most efficient routes to complete them on time. Software like Upper can help you create multi-constrained delivery routes, considering traffic, delivery time windows, drivers’ shifts, break durations, and vehicle capacity specifics. It helps reduce idling, backtracking, and hence, fuel and operational costs. Chef Nicole, for example, a South Florida-based healthy meal delivery service has managed to save 10 hours on weekly planning and increased daily deliveries by 200%. “Finding Upper was like discovering the perfect solution for our delivery challenges. It’s user-friendly, efficient, and simply gets the job done.”~ Nathaniel Pool, Managing Partner, Chef Nicole Quick dispatch and dynamic routing capabilities Dispatching must be fast and accurate to send optimized delivery schedules and routes to the right drivers. Look for software that lets you send planned routes to multiple drivers instantly or schedule their dispatch at a later date. Moreover, your software must let you edit the sequence of stops or reassign them to another driver to accommodate any changes, emergencies, or vehicle breakdowns. To adjust last-minute orders or cancellations, it should also enable you to add or delete stops to in-transit routes. Real-time tracking Tracking your drivers in real time helps you stay aware of their progress, identify variances or deviations, and respond proactively to reduce them. So, your software must provide GPS tracking to let you track your order statuses to ensure deliveries are on track. Automated customer notifications Delivery status notifications based on real-time order tracking are crucial to keep your customers informed on order statuses. Hence, your software must provide automated delivery notifications to ensure visibility into delivery operations. It helps you build your customer loyalty and delivery experience. Contactless delivery option People are nowadays increasingly looking for contactless delivery for convenience and safety concerns. So, your software must provide a contactless delivery option for customers. Proof of delivery is a crucial component of contactless delivery and lets your drivers collect photos of delivered items and customers’ e-signatures. It helps you document deliveries digitally to create irrefutable evidence of completed deliveries. Integration with payment gateways is also important to ensure secure transactions. Analytics & reporting Data is valuable to understand your business performance. So, look for comprehensive reporting & analytics features that lets you track the percentage of successful deliveries, delivery times, or cost per delivery. You can then identify and address inefficiencies through informed decisions. Some Extra Valuable Features If you have just started and want bare-bones functionalities, you can go for software that provides the ones we discussed. However, if you are looking for enterprise-grade software, here are a few extra features you may consider. Inventory management Tracking your stock levels can help you monitor product levels in real time, avoiding under/overstocking and achieving inventory optimization. In-store picking Offering your customers the option to place orders online and pick a convenient time slot to pick them up from your physical store can enhance their shopping experience and flexibility. Personalized interactions Saving your customers’ information, including contact details, cart items, and purchase history can help personalize your buyers’ grocery shopping experience. You can use these details to personalize your product recommendations and marketing campaigns. Now that you know the must-have and additional features, let’s take a look at the 10 best software options. Top 10 Grocery Delivery Software Options for Your Business Upper At Upper, we understand the delivery challenges that grocery retailers face and offer features to overcome them. Right from managing scheduled deliveries from your regular customers to fulfilling last-minute high-priority orders or tracking deliveries to enhancing business performance, we help you achieve it all – that too efficiently. There are two ways you can create routes in Upper. The first way is straightforward in which you can simply import a spreadsheet or enter addresses manually to create routes. The other is using Upper’s contact management functionality. It is ideal if you have certain regular or subscription-based customers. In this, you can add your customers’ details, save them as contacts, and create routes for them. It’s as simple as that. Plus, you no longer need to add the same details for each stop every time you make a route. your regular customers. Got some additional instructions for specific contacts? No worries as you can add instructions “Don’t ring the bell” or “Leave the parcel on the side door” once and that’s it. Save yourself the hassle of adding the same driver instructions every time! On-time delivery is another critical aspect, especially if you deliver fresh produce. Upper lets you optimize routes based on customers’ preferences, drivers’ shifts, break durations, or priority. It ensures your drivers meet delivery timelines to preserve the freshness of products. Relying on Google Maps for routing but hitting the wall due to the lack of advanced optimization capabilities? Get Upper Route Planner’s Free Chrome Extension to optimize routes straight from Google Maps. What about last-minute changes that can disrupt delivery operations? With Upper, you can change the sequence of stops, add or delete them, or reassign them to another available driver. It helps you accommodate last-minute orders, cancellations, traffic jams, or emergencies like vehicle breakdowns or accidents. One of our clients associated with us for over four years remarked, “Our clients were making more money and we were able to maximize our routes instead of driving 20 minutes to someone and 10 minutes to another. We have a pretty much max of 5 minutes per for our biggest customer. It gets a lot of people in our 4-hour window.” You would want to track your drivers’ progress and inform customers of it. Upper provides GPS-based tracking to monitor your drivers’ real-time locations and trigger automated status notifications with precise ETAs, enhancing customer satisfaction. The bonus? You can customize your delivery notifications at each delivery stage to match your branding. “Love it. It does 90% of what I need to do daily.” ~ Capterra reviewer Tracking your delivery performance is essential to determine and avoid inefficiencies. And Upper’s reports & analytics feature offers summary and detailed route reports to help you with that. Here are some more features that you may want to explore: Mobile app for drivers: Upper’s app for drivers lets them view schedules, updates, and routes on the go. Driver-dispatcher chat: This functionality lets you connect with your drivers to help them understand and address their run-time issues. Quick search: Struggling with finding a customer’s information or driver profile from a long manifest? Upper gets you rid of it with Command + K. Simply press a few keystrokes to see what you are looking for and Upper gives a list of matching search results to choose from. Storefront integrations: Upper provides integrations or apps for popular e-commerce storefronts that import orders directly as location pins and create optimized routes instantly. 💡If you are an independent grocery delivery contractor struggling to meet timelines and reduce delivery costs, you can try out Upper Solo designed keeping in mind independent contractors’ unique needs and challenges. Rating: 4.6 / 5 (44 reviews) Pricing: Starts at $40 per user per month. If you still want to try how Upper’s Route Planner can elevate your delivery efficiency before committing to a paid plan, try Upper’s Free Route Planner to optimize a route with up to 20 stops. Kroger’s Hack to Timely Delivery Revealed: Route Optimization Want to ensure 100% on-time deliveries to maximize your customer satisfaction and repeat business? Implement Upper to optimize routes to help your drivers reach destinations on time every time. Try Upper DispatchTrack DispatchTrack is a popular last-mile delivery software that helps global businesses involved in logistics streamline delivery operations. DispatchTrack’s AI-powered routing is also a standout feature that helped it gain the second position on the list. It helps execute both on-demand and pre-order deliveries and supports curbside pickups. People also appreciate the user interface, which requires a minimal learning curve. However, there were instances where users found uploading stops was sluggish. Here are some salient features you may like: Territory planning: This feature allows you to plan routes considering sales volumes, commissions, drivers’ schedules, route feasibility, and service durations for your fleet. Static routing: It lets you plan routes balanced across customers’ preferences, seasonality, and delivery costs and make quick adjustments if required. Communication and collaboration: Communicate with all the stakeholders right from warehouse managers to sales reps who follow up on the upcoming week’s orders. Sales app: Integrated into the grocery delivery platform, this app offers live delivery data to your sales team to gauge customer satisfaction levels and plan future orders accordingly. Rating: 4.5 / 5 (32 reviews) Pricing: Not disclosed publicly. You can contact them to request a customer quotation. There is no free trial. Dispatch Science Dispatch Science is a cloud-based delivery software platform that relies on artificial intelligence, algorithms, and route optimization to simplify last-mile dispatching and delivery operations. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, this company is relatively new in the industry but can suit businesses managing high volumes of vehicles and orders up to 1000. Some more features that you may like are: Self-service access: This platform provides a portal for customers to place orders, view order history, download invoices, and analyze reports. Automated order assignment: It lets you view and group your orders based on specific filters that suit your business needs, define route distribution rules, visualize progress, and communicate with customers. Driver app: Provides drivers with mobile access to assigned stops, priority changes, turn-by-turn directions, and digital proof of delivery. One of the customers noted that DispatchScience provides a robust platform to manage multiple aspects, such as order entry, dispatch management, automated routing, invoicing, and a robust API. While users find routing capabilities satisfactory, they didn’t find tracking capabilities up to the mark. Some customers also pointed out the need for UI enhancements. Rating: 4.9 / 5 (9 reviews) Pricing: Starts at $675 per month for up to 10 drivers, with an additional $27 per driver you add. Instacart Instacart is the largest online grocery marketplace in North America that connects local stores and customers to provide on-demand grocery delivery services. With a network of over 500 retailers, Instacart has over 1 billion products to pick from. If you want, you can register your offline grocery store on Instacart and deliver orders via multiple Instacart ‘shoppers’ who shop and deliver orders to customers. Coming to features, you may like: Intuitive app: Customers can choose from different retailers to shop for products from, based on their requirements. Flexible delivery options: Allows you to offer multiple options, including same-day delivery and in-store pickup for your customers. Personalized recommendations: Suggest products as per your customers’ cart items, previous purchasing history, and demand patterns. While Instacart may relieve you of the hassle of managing deliveries yourself (and that costs you less!), you won’t have complete autonomy over them. Plus, if your shoppers fail to select items of optimal quality, especially if they include fresh produce, your brand reputation may be on the line. Rating: 4.3 / 5(43 reviews) Pricing: Varies by partnership agreement, where you don’t have to pay upfront costs but have to pay a percentage of each sale. ShopHero ShopHero provides a range of connected solutions to help independent grocery stores of all sizes build a full-fledged online marketplace. It provides a “white-label” solution to attract, engage, and retain customers with multiple features to support your online, in-store, and mobile shoppers. It focuses on providing features like tipping integration to enhance your employees’ experience. Some noteworthy features are: Cartlist: Build shopping lists, create product catalogs, and specify shelf locations using this, eliminating the need for in-store labor. eCommerce storefront: Develop an online storefront that provides a complete shopping experience. Social media management: Promote your services and manage your customers’ reviews across social media platforms. Mobile app: Build and customize an e-commerce app for customers to place and manage online grocery ordering. As it is fairly new, there is no review on Capterra, but there are 25 reviews with an average rating of 4.4 on G2, most of them “incentivized”. People liked the speed of information retrieval and multi-platform support but found customer service to be not adequately responsive. Moreover, bugs when making payments online using apps were also reported. Rating: None Pricing: Not publicly available. You can contact them for a custom quote. Onfleet Onfleet is a trusted last-mile delivery platform with over 1000 clients across different industries, one of them being grocery delivery. Onfleet’s base price is similar to Dispatch Science’s, making it a fit for mid-size markets, but billing is missing. The highlight functionality is the auto-assignment of jobs to the most suitable drivers based on multiple parameters, such as location, availability, and performance. As a Capterra user quotes, “Modern logistics platform for serious on-demand companies”. Some additional important features include: Driver app: Onfleet provides a mobile app for drivers to connect with dispatchers in real time, view schedules, instant task updates, and follow turn-by-turn directions. Customer portal: Using this portal, your customers can view and manage orders to enhance their overall satisfaction. Real-time notifications: Using the predictive ETA functionality, you can send precise times for the arrival of deliveries so customers stay prepared and available to receive orders. Data & analytics: This functionality helps you track customer interactions, like reviews, completion rates, ratings, and comments, and make informed decisions to improve delivery performance. Customers like this software for user-friendliness, but find it hard to save locations to a vehicle. However, some users found it slow to update or add orders at times. Routing is also sub-optimal in some instances. Rating: 4.6 / 5 (93 reviews) Pricing: Starts at $550 per month, including 2000 deliveries or pickups. The next pricing tier starts at $1265 per month, includes 5000 deliveries and pickups, and provides barcode scanning and age verification. OnTime360 OnTime 360 is a professional-grade last-mile delivery solution that provides a comprehensive suite of features at affordable prices. A salient feature is the customer’s self-dispatching which lets your customers place orders and schedule pickups themselves. The other features that may add value to your business are: Order entry tools: Create a customer’s profile with all the relevant information. Simply type the first few letters of the customer’s name to retrieve it every time. Billing management: Using OnTime 360, you can achieve complete control over manual invoice generation and customization. Accounting management: Integrates with QuickBooks Online to track and manage invoicing and payment information efficiently. While people like the ease of use, they weren’t happy with the inability to bulk-optimize all tasks. Routing is sub-optimal, requiring manual intervention at some places. Rating: 4.3 / 5 (37 reviews) Pricing: Starts at $99 per month, and includes 250 shipments. QuickBooks integration, automated route scheduler, and automated pricing for route stops start at $249. Shipday Shipday is an AI-powered delivery management platform popular for on-demand deliveries. A standout feature is the integration with popular storefronts, including Shopify, WooCommerce, GrubHub, and Wix, which enables you to synchronize online with offline operations. The other considerable features are: Customer management: Store contracted rates with OnTime’s complex price sets to create accurate orders. Feedback tracking: Use AI to determine patterns in your customers’ reviews or ratings and generate responses instantly. Vehicle management: Track your vehicles’ maintenance schedules and notify you of due dates for maintenance to prevent sudden breakdowns. While you may find it great for small to mid-sized businesses, you may not find its reporting capabilities adequate for enterprise-level businesses. Rating: 4.7 / 5 (26 reviews) Pricing: Starts at $39 per month, includes 750 orders and $0.04 per additional order. Growcer Growcer provides a 100% white-label solution with ownership for your lifetime. This eCommerce grocery platform is completely scalable and customizable to fit your business needs. Whether you are an admin, vendor/seller, or delivery staff, Growcer provides great functionality to cater to your specific business needs. Users like the efficiency of data handling and the customer support team’s responsiveness. However, there are limited customization options as one of the users mentioned. Another G2 user pointed out the minor bugs you may need to troubleshoot with the customer support team. Here are a few more salient features. Auto order completion: Configure the number of days after which an order is marked ‘Completed’. It prevents the buyer from initiating a return. Delivery slots management: As a seller, you can specify your customers’ preferred time slots and your shop’s opening hours to schedule deliveries accordingly. Accept/Reject Order: Using this feature, drivers can accept or reject orders based on their schedules, feasibility, comfort, or route. It helps increase their flexibility at work. Buy Online Pick-In Store (BOPIS): Allow your buyers to place the order online and pick a convenient time slot to pick them up physically. Rating: 5 / 5(1 review) Pricing: Offers two types of packages, one with web apps and the other with a web app and mobile apps. The former starts at $499 and the latter starts at $1999. Naveo eCommerce If you look for reviews, there is none probably because it is relatively new. However, we chose to put Naveo on the list due to the versatility of features it provides to establish a connected grocery eCommerce store. Moreover, it appeared in the top search results for ‘grocery delivery software’, and hence we placed it. On their site, they mention they provide an end-to-end platform designed to help grocery retailers streamline their operations. Some features that may interest you are as follows. Storefront: Select an existing off-the-shelf online storefront or headless commerce option if you want to design your storefront your way. Commerce engine: Naveo lets you handle large assortments and baskets, an advanced price book, and highly detailed product data like dietary preferences. Distributed order management: This allows you to handle multiple delivery options, including home, click ‘n’ collect, locker delivery, or dropshipping. Last-mile delivery: Optimize routes based on delivery time slots and areas and notify customers of arrival times to enhance their experience. Rating: Not available as of now Pricing: Not publicly disclosed FAQs 1. What types of grocery stores offer online delivery? Traditional retailers (Walmart, Kroger) and online-only grocers (Boxed) both offer e-commerce solutions, with brick-and-mortar stores handling home delivery and pickup, while online grocers fulfill orders from warehouses. Local grocers can add online delivery to complement their existing business. 2. Which is better: DIY deliveries or third-party delivery services? DIY deliveries offer control and higher profits but require significant resources to scale. Third-party delivery services enable quick scaling and lower upfront costs but reduce control, profits, and direct customer relationships. 3. What are the popular grocery delivery business models? On-demand delivery and scheduled delivery are the prominent business models. While on-demand delivery fulfills customers’ orders as they place them and doesn’t involve grouping similar orders or dispatching the orders along the same route to a single driver. It may provide instant gratification for customers but may make it hard for small businesses to stay profitable. Scheduled deliveries let you group and dispatch delivery orders lying along the same route to the same driver, saving time, distance, and costs. 4. What is the secret to keeping a grocery delivery business profitable? The best way to stay profitable in your grocery delivery business is to minimize your cost per delivery. You can create optimal routes to maximize your deliveries per day, and route optimization software like Upper can help you with it. 5. What is grocery delivery software? Grocery delivery business software is a solution designed to simplify grocery delivery operations, including ordering, inventory management, and delivery management. The main aim of this grocery delivery platform is to reduce delivery time, ensure on-time completion, and minimize operational costs. 6. What challenges does grocery delivery software help overcome? Grocery software helps you overcome challenges, such as inconsistent delivery experience, unreliable third-party delivery services, lack of freight visibility, and poor performance tracking. Grocery Delivery Software: Key to Enhancing Your Operations Grocery delivery software is key to increasing your delivery efficiency, but the difference lies in making the right choice. For on-demand grocery delivery, Shipday and Instacart are solid choices. For scheduled deliveries with route optimization, consider Upper, DispatchTrack, Dispatch Science, Onfleet, or OnTime360. For complete e-commerce solutions with delivery capabilities, Growcer, Naveo eCommerce, and ShopHero are worth exploring. Author Bio Jeel Patel Jeel Patel is the Chief Executive Officer at Upper. With 5+ years of experience in dev, outbound, and inbound sales, He is committed to growing conversion through inbound and outbound activities. Outside the office, Jeel loves to spend time with his dog and take him on long walks. Read more. 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