Tesco Plc, the UK’s biggest supermarket group, will expand its online grocery shopping across the whole country, the first chain to reveal such plans. By the end of the year, the company expects over 100 stores to carry the service.
Tesco claims to already have 200,000 subscribers to its subscription-free internet service, increasing at 10,000 a week, and is also currently the only grocery store to provide content to NTL’s internet television service (CI No 3,630). Both services take users directly into Tesco’s home shopping web site.
For two years Tesco has run a trial scheme in London, fine-tuning its system, but the scheme is still remarkably low-tech at the back-end. At first, store assistants would take customer orders off web forms and manually select items off the shelf. Now, customers’ shopping lists are sent to electronic shopping trolleys, meaning assistants can manually fill four orders at a time off the shelf.
