Grocery mobile app case study
This grocery app case study shows how Onix built a branded mobile application for a grocery store chain
Retail
Industry
8 specialists
Team size
Ukraine
Location
2021 - present
Project duration
[ Business goals and context ]
The Fayno Market chain comprises 200+ big and small grocery stores in 4 central regions of Ukraine, serving over 150,000 customers daily.
Fayno Market’s slogan is “Everything you need is nearby!” The company refers to its patrons as “neighbors” and aims not only to provide them with quality products and services but also to nurture friendly and supportive neighborhoods.
As a socially responsible business, Fayno Market has been:
Taking measures to go green and digitize offline processes, e.g., replacing plastic loyalty cards with virtual cards
Providing discounts for over 100,000 senior citizens and 2,500 Fayno Market employees monthly
Conducting and promoting charitable projects
Supporting local producers
The business idea behind creating a grocery store application was:
To involve more consumers in the loyalty programs
To gain a competitive advantage in marketing
To adapt the business to the customers’ changing needs using analytics
Fayno Market was looking for a food and grocery app development company that could develop a solution from scratch in a very short time. Our managers convinced them that Onix’s specialists have the necessary experience and skillsets.
The Onix team was tasked with
Programming a native iOS application
Developing a native Android application
Building a database for customer activity data
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The Fayno Market application has interfaces designed for two categories of users
Grocery store customers
The customers’ mobile app interface enables users to join the Fayno Market community and choose their home grocery to fully access the benefits Fayno Market offers. A user can:
View promotions (discounts on specific products) in the home or other Fayno Market groceries
View personalized offers – discounts formed for an individual patron based on their purchase history, personal information, and responses to various surveys
Track their progress through 5-level loyalty programs
Use their loyalty card while shopping
View their purchase history and analyze their spending
Acquire, track, and donate bonuses towards charitable causes
Purchase and send gift cards
Fayno Market employees
The employees’ app interface facilitates the management of the employees’ workflow and provides the same benefits associated with the loyalty program as the customers enjoy. An employee can:
View their loyalty program details, bonuses, charitable projects, and news
Have the loyalty card barcode scanned at the checkout point
View special offers for employees
View their work schedule
Send and receive push notifications, e.g., to call a selected employee or employees to a specific workstation
Manage their profile information
Send gift cards to people on their contact lists (planned functionality)
The phases of the grocery app project
Project requirements clarification
Due to a tight deadline, it wasn’t feasible to realize all of the client’s ideas and wishes in the first version of the mobile application.
Together, we reviewed, discussed, and approved the proposed app features and software requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP).
Dev team and technology stack selection
The team that worked on the project at different times included:
2 mobile app developers
2 back-end developers
2 UX/UI designers
Quality assurance (QA) engineer
Project manager
Tech stack including Swift, Kotlin, and CakePHP for a common back-end application with Rest API facilitated functionality customization. PHP-based back-end development facilitates database integration and content management; CakePHP ensures convenient request management settings.
Programming and integrations
Along with user-facing applications, our team built a database to store receipts, products, and customer activity information. The analysis of this data enables marketers to personalize special offers, among other things.
Integration with the client’s internally developed customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems was challenging, but we worked out an architecture that perfectly met their needs.
Our team also created separate endpoints for QA engineers to initiate tests of automatic production processes, such as sending push notifications.
Initial app design adaptation
The client provided the initial user experience (UX) design. However, our team had to make changes as they added functionalities.
Another contractor was responsible for the app’s initial visual design, but Onix’s designers created the receipts and receipt details screens and screens with flexible surveys.
They used Figma to create the graphic design and clickable prototypes.
Testing and release
Thanks to clear product requirements and Agile project management, the team delivered the planned MVP features on time, with few change requests and bug fixes. The team also performed usability testing and the necessary metadata, data quality, reference data, procedure, regression, integration, and performance testing for the database.
Fayno Market’s mobile apps were published on Apple’s App Store and Google Play store in late 2021.
Onix’s specialists continued maintaining the apps and fixing bugs. Eventually, they also integrated the Fayno Market app with the Creatio CRM and ITTel telephony.
App redesign and new functionalities
In 2023, the client ordered an app upgrade: they updated their brand identity and loyalty program and were developing new trademarks and brands. Onix received a new brand style guide for Fayno Market developed by another design studio.
Our designer completely reformatted the mobile app, updated the logic, and added screens for new features, such as incentivized surveys, spending analytics, and bonus management. He also overhauled the user profile and promotions and offers, creating user-friendlier cards.
Onix also reprogrammed the apps’ back-end in Hyperf, a trending PHP CLI framework.
Website upgrade
In 2024, Onix took over the work on the Fayno Market website as well. Onix’s designer completely redesigned it following the new brand style guide.
Auto-checkout UX design
Also in 2024, Onix designed the screens for Fayno Market’s auto-checkouts to make the shopping process even more straightforward, convenient, personalized, and sustainable.
The user flow includes the use of loyalty cards in the mobile app, bonuses, and gift cards.
Do you plan on building a delivery app or another solution for a supermarket chain?
The key features of the grocery app
Three loyalty programs
Fayno Market offers loyalty programs for three categories of patrons:
Bonus program for all customers
Senior citizen program
Employee program
Employees and Senior citizens are eligible for 20% and 10% discounts, respectively. If their monthly expenditures exceed ₴3,000, these discounts cease, and the general Bonus loyalty program activates automatically.
Five loyalty program levels
Fayno Market’s loyalty programs have 5 levels, moving through which customers receive extra bonuses and unlock new benefits:
Fine Neighbor. Customers can pay with accumulated digital change and support charitable projects.
Friendly Neighbor. Customers can access the Bonus Account and receive personalized offers.
Master of Neighborliness. Customers can access the Bonus Account, receive personalized offers, earn extra bonuses for surveys, and benefit from Partnership Programs. + 150 bonuses
Loyal Neighbor. Customers can access the Bonus Account, receive personalized offers, earn extra bonuses for surveys, and benefit from Partnership Programs. + 150 bonuses
Doctor of Neighborliness. The benefits of Master of Neighborliness. + 200 bonuses
Faynyi Dvir (“Fine Community”)
Aiming to create an online outlet for the neighbors’ goodwill and support nationwide and local charitable initiatives, Fayno Market included this feature in the app update in 2024. Now, the mobile app allows customers to donate accumulated bonuses to aid:
The Armed Forces of Ukraine
Clinically ill or disadvantaged children
Animal shelters
The app makes donations effortless for customers and tracks Current crowdfunding projects’ statuses.
The ‘Past projects’ tab displays Fayno Market’s completed projects, where customers can also access reports.
Personalized offers & discounts
One of the biggest challenges was to generate appropriate special offers and discounts for customers, taking into account multiple parameters:
User`s city of residence
User’s favorite grocery
Purchase history
Personal information, e.g., their kids’ ages, pets, etc.
Other customers’ preferences
In-app activity, etc.
The system uses statistical samples from Fayno Market’s CRM, which tracks the history of a customer’s interactions with the company.
Partnership programs
This feature enables app users to access offers from Fayno Market’s partners, such as cinemas and taxi services.
Customers can get discounts on rides, movie tickets, and shopping at partner stores using promo codes.
Gift cards
Customers can purchase single and multiple virtual gift cards in the app and send them to persons on their contacts list in WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, or via email.
In addition to gift cards for ₴50, ₴100, ₴200, ₴300, ₴500, and ₴1,000, users can create custom gift cards of any value.
News
The mobile app is integrated with Fayno Market’s website to update customers on the latest developments, events, and charitable activities.
Flexible surveys
This tool enables Fayno Market administrators and marketers to poll the customers on the grocery stores’ service and mobile app experience to generate valuable insights and build productive customer relationships.
Several events in the mobile app trigger surveys to pop up: login, personalized offers view, user’s transactions, etc. Fayno Market rewards customers with bonuses for completing them.
Database
Fayno Market’s database stores information about millions of receipts; it has to process requests fast. It took significant effort to build a DB management system in such a way as to speed up the request-response flow.
The indexes in the database were built for each request that was slowing down the processing. We also adjusted the requests several times to improve performance. For example, we set up complex conditions, such as verifying dates and other items not at once but selecting a limited dataset first and only then processing the data in bulk. We run the table analyzer periodically to improve search by indexes.
As the client didn’t want to use an admin panel, we built a tool enabling Fayno Market to administer the database themselves.
The DB is set up on the client’s server.
Integration with Diia
The updated Employee’s personal account is integrated with the Diia e-governance portal. This integration enables Fayno Market employees to sign and share documents from the company.
Core technology stack we used
Redux in Swift,
Kotlin,
CakePHP,
Hyperf
[ Results ]
In the first year of operation, the mobile apps helped Fayno Market raise the number of receipts by 6.6 million, accrued bonuses by 7 million, redeemed bonuses by 7.3 million, and the sales by ₴1 billion.
Over three years, the Fayno Market app has seen over 300,000 downloads.
Currently, the app serves 26,000 users daily and 97,000 monthly. 81% use the Android version, and 19% use the iOS app. The app enjoys an excellent Day 1 retention rate of 39.7%.
Continuous communication with the client and user feedback monitoring facilitates continuous app improvement.
New features are planned:
Product Scanner
Referral Program
Wishlist
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