Problem: Often when in need of groceries buyers don’t have a clue on what they are out of, and have to go through the house making a list, often missing the essentials, and often using unnecessary time. Everyone has gone through the terrible feeling of remembering an essential item you needed from the supermarket the second you step back into your house.
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Solution: This model functions as a regular grocery list of household essentials, which counts down the days that it will likely take for people to completely use up their supplies. The time expectation will be adjusted depending on data that can determine when the user is actually expected to use up a specific resource. When the user is out of, or close to out of a resource, an online cart (on apps such as Instacart, Amazon, etc) with the supplies needed will be created for the user to approve the purchase.
There are a lot of household items that are repeat buys, milk, bread, and eggs are often a weekly purchase and are very easy to keep track of when they are needed. Meanwhile, toothpaste, toilet paper, and soap are also very consistently used, to the point that it can be predicted or even tracked how long it should take to use them, but they are often bought in larger quantities and harder to notice that you are out of or running low on until you run out. The app keeps track of how long it should take to use up the supplies, factoring in travel and family size, and provides a countdown until the supplies need to be purchased again.
Competitors of this idea include: Amazon, Shien, and Doordash. There is definitely already an industry for shipping rather than shopping, this app adds the new element of using the habitual purchases of the user to its advantage. Various other businesses with models similar to Grocery Countdown have been able to thrive because they help provide necessities alongside convenience,making this app would attractive in this sense.
A study designed in 2019 by Rotterdam school of Management further supports the value this model could bring to not only people but also supermarkets -
In a study conducted by Dr Fernandes and Prof. Puntoni from Rotterdam school of Management conducted an experiment in which 145 students were asked to buy 10 specific grocery items at an online grocery store. One third of the participants was told to use a memory-based search, one third to use a stimulus-based search and the other third was not told which search strategy to use. They replicated this experiment with 407 US workers who were recruited online. The study found that people are more likely to forget the items they infrequently buy when using the memory-based search. The researchers even suggested that “to increase sales, supermarket managers could try to help customers to remember all the items on their mental shopping list.”
Monetization: Convenience tax on the items purchased during the ordering process.