Alaska Commercial Company operates 37 grocery and home goods stores across rural Alaska. Shopping in Alaska is unique, as customers can geographically live far away from store locations and in remote areas, receiving their deliveries via bush plane. Also, the majority of food consumed in Alaska is shipped there.
ACC asked CitrusBits to create a suite of ecommerce solutions for their customers across mobile, web, and with an admin dashboard to manage their retail business. We also needed to account for the low connectivity issues that rural Alaska residents typically face. Part of the scope was to ensure the platform could support online payments using SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) funds, a federal program providing monthly benefits to help its clients pay for groceries they need to thrive.
At the onset, Alaska Commercial had a lot of technical questions about the backend needing additional integrations and tweaking. Our engineering team answered their questions and provided strategic recommendations. We did a two-week product exploration exercise that greatly helped ACC iron out the unknowns and any doubts their team had about the scope of work, features, tech stack, and development plans.
CitrusBits designed and developed ecommerce mobile apps for iOS and Android using React Native, and a web app experience with matching features to the mobile solution. We also built a robust admin panel that allowed visibility at a high level into the ACC business, as well as order management at the local store level. Because of where ACC’s distribution points are located, often orders would need to be shipped out using small airplanes — so bush delivery was designed into the final app as an option for rural customers.
We continued to apply new requests for changes and improvements as the project progressed. The duration of the scope of this project continue to expand as it was being created. The Alaska Commercial team continues to work with us on further tool integrations and improvements that can be made to the platform.
CitrusBits developed a comprehensive digital ordering platform for Alaska Commercial. Features include checkout, split payment, order history tracking, custom bakery orders, and grocery list creation. The split payment feature allows users to use more than one credit card or other payment types in a single transaction.
For customers far away from where ACC’s grocery stores are located, bush delivery to remote villages is available through the app and shopping site. Many Alaskan customers have expensive mobile data plans because it’s a rural area. To solve for this, we designed in a low-bandwidth option that customers can toggle on and off so that they don’t spend a ton of money using the app.
Alaska Commercial customers can now easily place orders online and on the app. The platform also includes local AC store discounts. Soon, the platform will also include support for online EBT payments using SNAP funds, to help improve food security for Alaska residents.
The holistic ecommerce platform is positively changing the lives of rural Alaskans.
