Tazamart: Building an Online Grocery App for Life On the Go

Overview

Every design and technical decision had to be judged against one question: does this make grocery ordering faster, or slower?

Grocery shopping is the one errand nobody has extra time for. It's repetitive, it's usually done under time pressure, and it's the kind of task people are actively looking to remove from their day rather than spend more time on.

Tazamart was built for Arpatech to do exactly that — an online grocery app designed around speed and simplicity, so ordering groceries takes minutes instead of a trip to the store. The focus wasn't on reinventing grocery shopping; it was on stripping out every unnecessary step between "I need milk and bread" and the order actually being placed.

The problem

Grocery apps are a crowded space, but a lot of them fail at the one thing that actually matters for this category: speed of use. Arpatech needed Tazamart to solve the actual use case — "on the go."

• Browsing large grocery catalogs on a small screen often turned into a slow scroll through irrelevant categories
• Repeat shoppers were forced to search for the same items every time, with no fast way to reorder a regular list
• Checkout flows with too many steps caused cart abandonment — especially for time-pressed midday orders
• Delivery timing was often vague ("today" or "tomorrow") instead of a clear window users could plan around

Designing for Speed First

Architecture & tech stack

Tazamart is a catalog-to-checkout grocery funnel optimized for thumb-speed use. Home combines login entry, search, offer banners, category chips, and a recommended grid. Category browse uses a sticky side rail (e.g. Vegetables) with a product grid — price, weight selector, discount badge, and Add. Cart holds quantity steppers, delete, savings banner, and a payable breakdown before login/place-order. Orders and push notifications close the loop on confirmation → packed → out for delivery → delivered, while stock checks gate cart/checkout so unavailable SKUs fail before payment, not after.

Key features

Engineering challenges & solutions

Results

• Delivered Tazamart for Arpatech as an on-the-go grocery ordering experience
• Home → category → cart funnel documented for speed-first grocery UX
• Native iOS commerce client over an e-commerce catalog/order backend
• Promotion and savings surfaces designed for quick decision-making, not browsing for sport

What I’d do differently

• I would invest earlier in dedicated search indexing infrastructure before the catalog hits peak SKU count.
• Checkout can still shed fields based on real abandonment data — especially guest vs logged-in paths.
• Weekly grocery list templates deserve earlier priority given how repetitive grocery behavior is.

Frequently Asked Questions