Australian retail chain Woolworths is this week running a ‘virtual supermarket’ trial in Melbourne and Sydney, the first of its kind in the country.
The trials, at Melbourne’s Flinders St Train Station and Sydney’s Town Hall Station, opened yesterday and will run all this week.
Consumers are able to buy a range of 120 products from the virtual stores by scanning barcodes displayed with a picture of the product on their iPhone or Android smartphone using Woolworths’ app.
The ‘shopping list’ created is then paid for via the app, and delivered from the retailers’ distribution centres, with a minimum order of A$30 and delivery fees starting from A$13.
The virtual store display is essentially another front-end to Woolworths’ existing online store, which can already be accessed through the retailers’ website and smartphone app.
“The virtual supermarket wall is just one idea we are working on to make our customers’ lives easier,” stated Woolworths’ director of supermarkets Tjeerd Jegen.
“The virtual supermarket will be at Town Hall for a week and we will take feedback from customers throughout this time. This experience will provide us with important information on how we can develop this concept into the future.”
Produce Plus visited the Melbourne display during rush-hour this morning. The size of the display was obviously constrained by the amount of wall-space available in high traffic areas of Flinders St Train Station, but was definitely drawing interest from passers by.
Woolworths’ trial follows a similar exercise by Tesco in South Korea, which ran along very similar lines, but used QR codes rather than standard barcodes.
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