Grocery shopping over the internet is taking off fast, with figures from Tesco.com this week showing that it has signed up 750,000 customers and delivered its millionth order. And it's no longer just a pilot operation available from a few supermarkets; Tesco says it now covers 90% of the UK, a level not seen anywhere else in the world.
It's not just big-name supermarkets that are using the internet to sell groceries. Specialist grocers such as Simply Organic Food, which boasts more than 1,500 organic products ranging from fruit and veg to dog food, and Farmers Market Direct, a group of UK farmers who will deliver fresh meat and farm produce to your door, are also seeing business boom.
With this trend in mind Jobs & Money decided to investigate how easy online grocery shopping really is. The good news for supermarket phobes is that early gremlins in the systems have been cleaned out, and the supermarkets' sites are fairly straightforward to use. It varies somewhat between store groups - and Safeway is notable by its absence from the virtual world - but, broadly speaking, a first-time shopper need only log on to the supermarket's website and type in their postcode.
This is the first step. Not all supermarkets deliver nationwide, so putting in your postcode will establish if your chosen store operates in your area. It will also pinpoint which branch will do the delivery and make sure you only get that branch's shopping list - avoiding a situation where you merrily pick products stocked in the out-of-town hypermarket only to discover that the inner-city branch which will be serving you has only a quarter of the goods in stock.
You then go into the supermarket's lists and click on the items you want. Once you've finished, just enter your delivery details and choose a time for the goods to be dropped off.
It's at this stage that the service varies from store to store. With Sainsbury's, for example, you can enter your credit card details while you are ordering. But with Asda, you pay the driver who delivers your goods. There are also slight variations on the delivery times offered by each supermarket. Most have an order deadline ranging from noon to 4pm for next day delivery. Some charge £5 per delivery and others £3 or even nothing.
Some will deliver between 9am and 9pm, others between 8am and 10pm. Some work seven days a week, while others are shut on Sundays. Most will ask you to choose a two-hour time slot on a delivery day when someone will need to be at home.
However, some, such as Simply Organic Food, will leave your order in the garden shed or with a neighbour. All you have to do is leave special instructions for the driver when you are processing your order.
The more specialised the company, the more likely it is that you will have to be flexible on delivery times. If you're ordering pork from Farmers Market Direct, for example, and have just missed out on one batch of pigs being slaughtered, you may have to wait a few days for the next batch to go. The pay-off is that the meat is guaranteed to be British, from the same source you bought it from last time, and reared in accordance with the RSPCA's Freedom Food Welfare Scheme.
Whoever you shop with, you should be able to save your shopping list file, so you don't have to scour the website for your most popular buys each time you place an order - supermarkets offer around 25,000 products, but most customers buy only 250 different ones in a year. You should also be able to save delivery and payment details, lessening the amount of time you spend online each time you order. Similarly, most of the nationwide supermarkets let online shoppers collect points on their store loyalty cards, although at present you have to redeem them in one of the shops.
The main downside of online grocery shopping is that if you log on during the peak evening and weekend times, or have a slow modem on your computer, you may find yourself sitting in front of your monitor for several hours, wondering whether the queues at the check-out could possibly be worse.
In addition, the delivery slots are allocated on a first-come first-serve basis. So it's not a good idea to process an order on December 24 and expect the delivery any time before the New Year. Other than that, you'll have to rely on the initiative of the supermarket's packers if one of your orders is not in stock. It's up to them to choose the closest substitutes.
But if that sounds like a small price to pay for never having to set foot in a supermarket again, give it a try.
