Kewaunee County grocery store Stodola's IGA working to offer online shopping

LUXEMBURG - The new, big-city way to shop for groceries is making its way to an independent, small-town store in Kewaunee County.

Stodola's IGA on State 54 is working to implement online grocery shopping, the first such site in the county. Testing will take place this summer and fall, and owner Alex Stodola hopes to have the system up and running for the public early next year.

When the shopping option does go live on the Stodola's website (stodola.iga.com), customers will be able to look up items, see pictures and costs, place orders and see the total bill when done. Store employees will fill the orders.

Stodola said the service will be for pick-up at the store only to start, although he plans to add a delivery option once things are running smoothly. Internet service in a number of places in the county continues to be spotty, but Stodola said the shopping pages will be scaled to work well on mobile devices.

Some might question if the county is ready for an online grocery shopping option. But for county residents, the nearest full-service groceries that offer it are in the Green Bay and Manitowoc areas, and Stodola said the time is right to bring it to his customers.

"We don't want to fall behind just because we're in a rural area," he said. "I really see this as the way consumers are going to shop."

Stodola also said the demographics are ready for online shopping, with a combination of an aging population and younger professionals who live in the county but work elsewhere. 

"Senior people are going to expect this, and we need to meet that," he said. "It could be used by people with elderly parents in the area. I think you're (also) going to see online sales used by people commuting into Green Bay to work. They don't have to stop and shop after working all day ... Young people, professionals in the area, it's the way they've learned to shop, and it's going to be available."

Stodola began seeing programs at various trade shows about three years ago and starting researching them two years ago. He chose to work with Freshop, a technology company based in Rochester, New York that works with independent stores to set up online shopping pages for their websites. Each store can customize its site for its needs, changes in inventory and sales with Freshop, which supplies images for each item from their UPC codes.

Stodola said the decision was made with the support of, and help from, IGA — the Independent Grocers Association.

"IGA is not a franchise, but it acts like a franchise," Stodola said. "They coordinate independent grocers ... they set this up. We don't have the economies of scale. If we had to fund this ourselves, I don't think we could do it."

The shopping program is mostly set up, with Stodola cleaning up some of the details on the site this summer before it's ready for the public, such as labeling the items so shoppers can easily find what they're looking for and understand what they're getting.

"We started implementing it last Thanksgiving but hit a few snags along the way," Stodola said. "But we've got everything in place, just tidying up a few things."

The program is set up so customers will be able to be as particular with their online selections as they are in the store.

"Bananas, you can select how green or yellow they want them; there's a drop-down menu for that," Stodola said. "Avocados, you can select one that's a little less ripe if you're not using it that day. Steaks, you can say you want it cut this way."

The biggest issue Stodola is working to resolve, an issue of which shoppers will need to be aware, is when ordering items priced by weight, such as fresh produce and meats. The system will estimate a price when the order is placed, but the actual cost may be different, although just slightly.

"I think that'll be hard for some consumers because of the variable weight of the items," Stodola said. "There might be a learning curve to that — 'You said it was 22 but it's 24.' It's flexible that way."

Stodola said he might ask some regular customers to take part in test runs this summer, to compare it to their in-store shopping experiences. Several store employees also will need to be trained, and Stodola said he might hire more to serve the online effort after it's run for a while and he thinks it needs more attention.

Stodola hopes to implement online shopping after the holiday season — "I'd hate to have it up in the holidays and have it fall flat," he said. Once it's running, expectations are high.

"I foresee this as growing pretty fast," Stodola said. "As more people get comfortable with it, more and more will go to this method of ordering groceries ... I think it'll be easy to use."

Contact Christopher Clough at 920-741-7952, 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Kewaunee County grocery store Stodola's IGA working to offer online shopping