Tesco Lotus is preparing to launch an online grocery shopping service in Thailand - the first for the British retailer in South East Asia.
'It should offer additional marketing opportunities, help boost sales as well as meet changing consumer lifestyles in Thailand,' Salinla Seehaphan, corporate affairs director of Ek-Chai Distribution System, told local newspaper the Nation.
It would be introduced toward the end of this year or early next year and would be trialled for a period before a smart phone applications was released, she added.
Seehaphan was reluctant to give an estimate as to the volumes the retailer expected to move using the planned service, as online retail was relatively new to Thai consumers.
The country was experiencing an upswing in ownership of smart phones and internet usage, however, which boded well for online sales in future, she added.
Other businesses under the Tesco Group umbrella were currently operating successful online shopping services in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Korea.
The success of these services highlighted how a change in consumer behaviour, Seehaphan told the newspaper.
Sean Hur, chief of online business for the Home Plus Group - a joint venture between Tesco and South Korea's Samsung - said Korean consumers were buying more online.
“Nowadays, more than 60 per cent of the South Korean population uses smart phones so we cannot just rely on our store for sales, but need to adopt technology and use applications,' Hur said.
Home Plus launched its home-shopping website in 2002, and now has more than 35,000 products available online.
In 2011, it launched a smart phone application, which has been downloaded by more than 1.4m users, and up to 55,000 customers use it to access the online store daily. Hur told the Nation the firm hoped at least 2m customers would have downloaded the application by year-end.
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