Let Others Do The Shopping So You Don't Have To! (tesco.com)

Member Name: Teena2003

Product:	tesco.com
Date:	01/03/08 (588 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: delivered to your door in all weathers, less temptation to impulse buy

Disadvantages: items not available, late or no delivery, delivery charge

My huge, local Tesco Extra is less than a mile up the road from where I live. I regularly go and get my shopping there. But I limit my shopping to urgent items I've run out of and fresh fruit and vegetables. Anything else I have delivered to my front door - mainly due to the fact I don't have a car.

I also use Sainsburys to deliver my shopping and normally alternate between the two companies (or favour one over the other when one has more of my favourite things on offer).

Before you can shop you have to sign up with Tesco. It's only a short exercise, they want to know your name address (after all, they have to deliver to you) and a password.

I signed up for shopping online with Tesco ages ago but only a while ago took up home delivery. I also have my Tesco clubcard registered on my account.



=== Speed of shopping ===

The first time you use the website it might take you ages to put together a shop and you start wondering why you actually bothered when going to the actual shop you can do it so much quicker. But just see it as your first visit to a new supermarket where you don't know you way around either. After the first visit you probably got the hang of it and know where the items you want are. The next orders should be a lot easier to put together as you can call up all product you bought in your earlier orders or just ask for your 'favourites' where all products you ever ordered will be listed. You can then go along that list and pick what you want and how much of each and if there are other items you can pick them from the categories.

Once online and logged into your account at tesco.com you simply go to the grocery category and pick and chose what you want to add to your order. There are a number of different categories (Food & Drink, Health & Beauty, Baby & Toddler, House & Pet) with subcategories to make shopping easier. I normally order the same things so I use my favourites for most of my order. But I still check the other categories for something I fancy that is not yet on the list of favourites.

I enjoy ordering online because I know that I will only buy what I actually want and need and there's no impulse buying of sweets and other things that I really don't need or can't afford.

Then there's the sticky subject of fresh fruit and vegetables that a lot of online shoppers worry about. I, as a general rule, don't order fresh fruit and vegetables because I want to pick those items for myself. I am very picky and wouldn't like someone else make the choice for me.

But I do not mind buying from the fresh meat, poultry or fish categories and I often buy pre-packed chicken breasts, sausages and burgers. I don't worry so much about the short shelf life with some of those items because I normally put them straight into my freezer or use it that day.

I often start a new order as soon as one is delivered. There is no need for it but I like to have an open order where I add products as and when I run out. It saves me time later when I actually want to order. Most of the products are already on the list and I only need to add a few more and the order is complete within a couple of minutes.

While you are adding products to you shopping basket, you will notice a total price of the shop running alongside. This is only a guide price as Tesco will tell you. They do not take off the special offers and BOGOF prices off until the shop is done in store and you are being charged on the day of delivery. Also, some prices are slightly different from store to store so you can't rely on the final total that you are given. In a lot of cases it will be less than you anticipated. I often have well in excess of £10.00 less than the guide price simply because the offers were taken off and of course substitutions were not made. Items not available will not get charged. While it's always nice to pay less than you expected, I prefer the Sainsburys way where they actually manage to give you a more true guide price because they can take special offers and even give you a running total of how much you have saved.


=== Favourites ===

As we all know, the clubcard stores not only your points for the visits but also the information about what you actually bought (for Tesco's targeted marketing purposes), these products get added to your "favourites" on the Tesco website so you don't need to trawl through the aisles of your virtual supermarket and find the products you normally buy anyway. Even if you don't have a clubcard, after your first delivery, everything you added to your list will be there for you to call up again if and when you need it.

It is very easy to get an order together when you only need to go along the items that you ordered before and you just pick what you need from that ever growing list. Often my entire order is put together by going along the list of favourites and picking them off one by one.


=== Checking out ===

Once you are happy with what is in your online shopping basked the last thing to do is the checkout.

If you didn't pick a delivery time at the beginning of your order, then you are asked to do it here. Different times of day or week carry different delivery charges. The first delivery in the morning tends to be the most expensive one and the very last one at night the cheapest. Saturday is the most expensive day altogether with delivery charge ranging from £6.25 first thing in the morning to £5.99 all through the rest of the day. However, if you have your order delivered on a Wednesday, the charge is £4.50 first delivery in the morning to £3.75 for the last slot at night.

You have a chance to review your whole order and make changes if you need to. But I'm normally happy with the list, after all, it has often taken me a month to put it together and finalise and everything on there is what I want.

Tesco offer to 'go green' and have your order delivered without bags. It is my preferred method. The order is packed into boxes and the driver is carrying those into the home and your have to unpack them as fast as possible. The only things still in bags are cleaning materials (bleach and suchlike) or items that could leak.

I opt out of substitutions as I don't want to receive items I did not pick. Once one of the drivers told me that I could return the items I didn't want to hand them back to him. Fair comment, but I picked the products on my list for a reason, if I'd wanted a different product I would have chosen it. I rather not have the product and know what I need to get myself than try and get a refund on items I returned.

Don't forget to add your voucher codes in if you have any for extra points on your clubcard or money off the shop.

All that's left is to enter you credit or debit card details and complete the checkout.

You will receive an email with a list of everything you ordered and confirmation of delivery time and guide price.

You still have time to change your order until a few hours before it's delivered. Just make changes if you need to and then finalise the checkout again. You will then receive another email telling you about the changes you made.

=== Banking a voucher ===

You often find a money off voucher codes online (often more than the obligatory £5.00 Tesco seem to offer). These vouchers often stop working long before the expiry date because too many people are using it and Tesco only allow each code to work a certain number of times.

It's best to 'bank' those vouchers. Once they are on you account they will be valid until their expiry date.

The other day I had a £10.00 voucher code for a shop over £50.00 (normal are £5.00 for a £50.00 shop) and I didn't want to lose it, nor did I want others to get in before me and it stops working. So I 'banked' the voucher.

'Banking' a voucher code is simple:
· Call up any old order (over the amount to make the code work)
· Go all the way through the checkout process (pick any delivery slot, they are reserved for two hours)
· Enter the code when the site asks you to (and remember when it expires)
· DO NOT complete checkout but close the page or log out
· Voucher code is banked
· To use it, simply call up the order you started, change the list of products to what you actually want to order and go through checkout process, you will find the voucher is there for you to use.

I had one voucher stored for the best part of three weeks before I actually used it.


=== Delivery ===

Tesco delivery takes place in two hour time slots, so you should expect your driver to arrive any time in those two hours. I have had varying experience with this. Sometimes my driver is on my doorstep at the very beginning of the slot, after all, I'm just down the road and it takes less than 5 minutes by car (or van) to my front door. Other times I had to wait until the end of the two hours. Of course there were times when the driver was late - but I didn't feel aggrieved, it was horrendous weather out there and he was doing his best. But I was totally hopping mad when I had come back from holiday and put in a huge order for the next day because I was out of everything and the driver didn't turn up at all. I had long arguments with the store (I have the mobile number of the dot com manager at my store) and hot arguments with the customer service people in the call centre.

Tesco delivery is always a bit hit and miss. When things go well, they are perfect but then they can also get things spectacularly wrong. I experienced both and everything in between. But I know that often it is a glitch and my positives outweigh the negatives. After all, they only once didn't delivery, all the other times it was fine - including the time when I got my delivery 15 minutes before the delivery slot had even started.

Normally the driver only needs to deliver to your front door. My drivers normally delivers to my kitchen, after all, I have to empty the boxes for him to take back. My last delivery driver was put off a little that he had to deliver boxes and not bags to a flat. He told me that a lot of drivers refuse to deliver to flats unless it's in bags. I can understand that if it's on a floor higher than ground, I live on the ground floor and that shouldn't make any difference at all. He didn't even need to walk up a single step but he was still moaning.

The driver should hand you a print out (receipt) of all your shopping, usually over two or more pages. All items you bought area listed in categories you would store them (with the exception of Alcohol and Tobacco which has its own category. The others are freezer, fridge and cupboard. Why newspapers are put under cupboard is anyone's guess.

Products not available at the beginning of the list, vouchers and savings at the end, just above the total you had to pay. It also tells you how many clubcard points you received for the order if your card is registered.

I always check all items on the list against what was delivered as there are occasions when the wrong amounts arrive. On my last order two bottles of wine were missing but I had got charged. I called the customer service number on top of the receipt and complained. They refunded to overcharged items back onto my card. (And while I was on the phone to them I had a good old whinge about the driver who didn't like delivering without bags to a ground floor flat - I was told my comments would be passed on to the local dot com manager.) I could have emailed them but it normally takes two days before they answer.


I enjoy having my shopping delivered. And while I quite like my Tesco delivery, I often favour Sainsburys. Their store may be a few miles further from me but very often their prices are lower and more competitive. Their delivery charge can be as low as £2.50 if you pick the right day (and your order is over £70.00). Their delivery slots are only one hour, shortening the time you have to wait in. I usually run identical orders on both sites and go with the ones that have more offers on the day.

All fresh food items are fresh and I cannot complain about any of that. While online you normally get told products with short shelf lives and you can make an informed decision whether or not you want to buy. But as I mentioned before, I do not buy fresh fruit and vegetables online, those are the items I do like to pick out myself.

But I don't mind having someone else carry the heavy and/or bulky items into my flat, including tins, freezer stuff, toilet paper, kitchen towels and awkward cleaning products like bleach and the likes.

I don't normally have reason to complain and when I do, my enquiries are dealt with quickly and professionally.

The main advantage of shopping online for me is that I do not need to carry the shopping home. Without a car, a big shop is not easy and has to be done over many days, unless you have someone who can help you out with a car, you don't want to take too much on a bus anyway. It also stops me from spending more money than I want by impulse buys. After all, supermarkets are designed to make you buy more than you wanted by putting offers in your way that you neither wanted nor needed. None of this is possible when you order online. It's a bit difficult to put a big display area in the middle of an aisle when there's nothing but lists and pictures of products.

I can recommend Tesco delivery for most of the time. Of course, nobody is perfect and things sometimes go wrong. But that shouldn't stop you from trying again. Of course, if they mess up regularly, there are always other supermarkets out there who will fill the void and will deliver to you - if you have the luxury of multiple supermarkets where you live.

Summary: online supermarket grocery delivery service