Grocio Inc. just made it easier to get the best available price on your groceries. In fact, with the launch of the Tulsa-based company’s new iPad app, complementing its website and expanding electronic presence, you can make grocery purchasing decisions from virtually anywhere there’s a Wi-Fi connection.
Grocio.com, a comparison shopping agent for groceries, helps users find the best prices for items on their shopping list. Deals are also delivered directly to the user’s e-mail.
The site was developed by native Tulsan Gerald Buckley, and in 2008 was recognized with the second annual Mayor Kathy Taylor’s Tulsa Entrepreneurial Spirit Award (now the SpiritBank/Tulsa Community College Entrepreneurial Spirit Award). Buckley said he always envisioned the site’s target demographic as the CFO mom, who generally does all of the shopping and provisions for her family and cannot afford to waste money or time.
“We save her money up front by finding the best prices,” Buckley said. “Use of the website is free and our e-mail service delivers circulars from participating grocers in her area in one e-mail. By putting that information in one place and providing price certainty, we save her even more time and money.”
“The neat thing with social media is that everyone gets a voice and everyone is an equal,” he said. “It’s this really rich dialogue that, for those people who choose to participate, can be very rewarding in terms of the information you can get directly from your customer.
Through social media, he learned his customers had a growing desire to access online resources such as Grocio through mobile devices. That was a shift in consumer behavior he could directly relate to and saw potential in.
“The idea to create an app for an iPhone was easy,” Buckley said. “I was sold on the iPhone from day one and I believed very strongly people would use the device to in a number of ways they had not used previous mobile devices like it.”
The next step was not such an easy decision.
“I wasn’t sold from day one on the iPad,” he said. “Now that I have one, I’m like an evangelist for the thing. They made it so easy to develop applications for this platform, it became an easy decision.”
The iPad app, Grocio Inc.’s Store Circulars, is available in the iTunes App Store for $5.99.
Before he begins to heavily promote the app to new users, Buckley said he is relying on a community of early adopters to provide feedback he can use to engineer a better user experience, much like he used social media feedback to improve the website.
After refining the iPhone app, Buckley envisions a similar product for Google’s Android platform and hopes to explore opportunities to leverage location-based social apps like Foursquare.
However, the company’s expansion will not be limited to what it can offer online. During the last three years, Grocio has expanded from serving only the Tulsa market and now partners with grocers in 23 cities nationwide. Markets for future expansion have already been identified and Buckley is seeking major investors. «
“We are getting more than 100,000 PDF downloads per month and have registered shoppers in all 50 states,” he said. “We’ve launched in 23 cities with more on the way. Charlotte, N.C., is likely the next market we’ll enter.”
