Online Grocery Store Development
Grocery e-commerce is not fashion e-commerce. Thousands of SKUs, items sold by weight, substitutions, and a delivery window the customer has to trust. We build for those problems specifically.
We've already built this: G Foods
An online grocery store with smart category filtering across a large catalogue, a cart that survives page reloads, and a checkout flow built to be finished in under a minute on a phone.
Problems we hear before the rebuild
- A 2,000-product catalogue that's impossible to browse without good filtering
- Items priced per kilo or per pound that break standard cart maths
- Customers ordering for delivery slots you can't actually fulfil
- Out-of-stock items discovered only after the customer has paid
- Repeat shoppers forced to rebuild the same basket every week
What's included
Catalogue that scales
Nested categories, instant search with typo tolerance, and filters for brand, dietary tags and price that stay fast at thousands of SKUs.
Weight and unit pricing
Sell by kilo, pound, bunch or piece, with correct cart totals and a policy for variable-weight items picked at the shop.
Delivery slot booking
Time windows with a capacity cap per slot, so you never accept more orders than your drivers can deliver.
Live stock control
Stock decrements at checkout, with configurable substitution or refund rules for anything that sells out mid-shift.
Reorder in one tap
Saved baskets and order history, because grocery is the one retail category where people buy nearly the same thing every week.
Picker-friendly order sheets
Printable or tablet order lists grouped by aisle, so staff pack a basket in one pass instead of three.
The catalogue problem
A clothing store sells eighty products and can afford a pretty grid. A grocery store sells two thousand and lives or dies on search and filtering. If a customer types "yoghurt" and gets nothing because your products are labelled "yogurt", you lost the sale and you'll never know.
We set up search with tolerance for spelling variants, plural forms and brand-versus-generic naming, then structure categories so anything is reachable in three taps. Filtering happens client-side where the dataset allows, so it feels instant.
Delivery slots that match reality
The fastest way to lose a grocery customer permanently is a late first delivery. So slots are capped: each window has a maximum number of orders, and once it fills it disappears from the checkout rather than sitting there collecting orders you can't serve.
You can adjust capacity per day of the week, close slots for holidays, and set a cut-off time after which same-day ordering stops.
Substitutions and stock
Groceries sell out between the order and the pick. Pretending otherwise creates refund arguments, so we make the policy explicit at checkout: the customer chooses whether they'll accept a similar item, a specific alternative, or a refund for that line.
Pickers see the customer's choice on the order sheet. Most support complaints in grocery e-commerce come from this single gap, and handling it up front removes them.
Questions we get asked
How much does an online grocery store cost to build?
Typically $3,500 to $10,000 for a custom store with delivery slots, weight-based pricing and stock control. Catalogue size matters less than the number of fulfilment rules — one shop with one delivery zone is straightforward, while multiple stores with separate stock and zones sits at the top of the range.
Should I just use Shopify instead?
Honestly, sometimes yes. If you sell a few hundred packaged products at fixed prices, Shopify plus a delivery-slot app will get you live faster and cheaper, and we'll tell you so. Custom becomes worth it when you sell by weight, need capped delivery windows, run substitution rules, or want picker workflows — the areas where grocery breaks standard e-commerce assumptions.
Can customers pay cash on delivery?
Yes. Cash on delivery, card on delivery and online payment can all run side by side, with different minimum order values per method if you want to discourage the expensive ones.
How do you handle thousands of products at launch?
We import from a spreadsheet or your POS export, so you don't key in products by hand. We'll clean up categories and units during the import and show you the result on staging before launch.
Will the site be fast with such a large catalogue?
Yes — category and product pages are statically generated and served from a CDN, so page weight doesn't grow with catalogue size. Search and filters query an index built for the purpose rather than scanning the whole product table.
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Tell us what you're building
One short call, then a fixed quote within 24 hours. No retainer, no obligation.
Or call +923186204100