About The Market at Edgewood

The Market at Edgewood is a 6 lane neighborhood market that’s food-obsessed and community driven in Palo Alto, California.  An IGA member and 3-time local winner of Best Grocery Store & Best Produce, The Market at Edgewood offers award-winning produce, hand cut meats, and the freshest local seafood. The Market at Edgewood started using the original Vori Ordering App in 2019, but with new ownership in September 2024, they re-evaluated their POS and Back Office systems with the long term vision of taking this single location market into a multi-location banner. 

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The challenge

When new ownership took over, sales were declining and they were looking for ways to increase profitability. Previously using a combination of NCR Encore for POS & NCR ABO for Back Office Management, The Market at Edgewood still relied heavily on manual processes to run their store. This resulted in errors, margin inefficiencies, extra labor costs, and lack of overall visibility into performance by department. Not only was this hurting the business, but also was not something that could successfully scale to multiple locations.

"When I took over, sales were down."

^{Navi, Owner} 

Inefficient invoice management

Taking 12+ hours a week, invoice management was extremely manual for their 135+ vendors. With their main supplier making up 70% of the store’s shelfshare, weekly price updates were automatically ingested into ABO, but the team had to manually update product descriptions one by one onsite. To make matters worse, for their smaller vendors, The Market at Edgewood sifted through stacks of paper invoices, went line by line, compared the prices to what was already logged into NCR ABO, and did manual calculations for any price discrepancies. Again, all of this work had to be done onsite at the store.

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Labor-intensive price changes

Pricing updates were time-consuming and incomplete. For their largest suppliers, The Market at Edgewood had a paid subscription for receiving updated price tags in the mail. Then the shelf tags needed to be adjusted on site. This meant employees walked the aisles to place updated tags across thousands of products. Plus, the sheets of price tags were not organized by aisle or product, but rather by UPC number, making this process very time consuming. Then for smaller vendors, there was admittedly no consistent rationale for price updates. Even with 2 full time employees manually updating price tags, price updates were “never complete” and ownership had no clear picture on what they should be charging for every item and what their margins were across the store. 

“Before we were blind. Some items we were selling under the cost, some we were selling too high. We were just shooting in the air.”

^{Navi, Owner}‍

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No time to create a loyalty program

Without a built in loyalty solution from NCR and strapped for time and resources, The Market at Edgewood didn’t have a way to offer a loyalty program with personalized discounts nor a points program to their customers. This meant not rewarding their most loyal customers and not engaging and building relationships with new ones.

Vori’s solution

In October 2024, The Market at Edgewood switched from NCR to VoriOS to streamline and optimize operations. Within 6 hours, Vori’s team implemented the new modern VoriOS POS system across all lanes without having to close down the store.

“I blinked, and I had a new system”

^{Navi, Owner}

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Reliable invoice management & cost changes

With VoriOS, The Market at Edgewood streamlined invoice processing and set up cost change notifications across vendors. This provided complete visibility into price discrepancies across 135+ vendors and allowed for easy optimization of margins across the board. VoriOS also gave all 7 department heads the ability to easily own their own price adjustments. Now they never miss a cost change and can even make updates from home. The owner, Navi, has even used Vori on the plane!

"If the price goes up and down, Vori tells me, 'You’re losing on that, you need to change the price.' It gives me a trigger according to my set target."

^{Navi, Owner}

Electronic shelf labels for fast price changes

With Vori’s Electronic Shelf Labels, The Market at Edgewood started mass updating prices on 6,000+ products with the click of a button. Especially helpful for items that fluctuate frequently, like produce, Electronic Shelf Labels allowed them to make shelf price updates automatically whenever they needed to adjust margins or specific item prices.

"What took me 2 hours before, now takes me 5 minutes."

^{Jorge, Grocery Manager}

Built-in customer loyalty to drive sales

With VoriOS Shopper Engagement, The Market at Edgewood launched a loyalty program with automated SMS marketing campaigns to quickly engage customers. By leveraging Vori’s Automated Campaign templates, they delivered targeted messaging based on shopper data. They also created their own custom messages to offer seasonal discounts and personalized rewards.

"The amount loyalty customers spend on average is about a $20 difference per basket."

^{Gunnel, General Manager}

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The results

Within two months of implementing VoriOS, The Market at Edgewood not only recovered from declining monthly sales, but increased monthly sales by $110k compared to the previous year. Within 5 months, their loyalty program drove a 23% lift in net sales with loyalty shoppers both spending 14.15% more per basket and visiting the store 37.83% more often. What’s more is 28% of loyalty program sales was generated by re-engaging lost shoppers.

+23%

in Total Net Sales from Loyalty Program

+7%

in Gross Margins

2

Full-time Employees Repurposed

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Additionally, they increased their gross margins by a whopping 7-10% (depending on the department) with VoriOS Invoice Management and Cost Changes. The Market at Edgewood also repurposed 2 full time employees that were solely focused on manually updating price tags to other departments, like helping with sales & the loyalty program. The store reduced labor spent on price changes as well as increased productivity in revenue generating areas.

“I’ve already recommended Vori to a lot of friends who are in the grocery business. You should try Vori if you want to make some money.”

^{Navi, Owner}