Online Stores: Woolworths Online 1

by QuestionFox • Review, Store • Tags: , , , , ,

After my first expe­ri­ence buy­ing gro­ceries online, I thought it was only fair to try the com­pe­ti­tion as well. So last week I ordered a batch of gro­ceries from Wool­worths online store — keep­ing the order a sim­i­lar price to the one I ordered from Coles Online ear­lier in the month.

How was the over­all experience?

I had dif­fi­culty with the reg­is­tra­tion at first — it refused to allow me to val­i­date my address, even after I tried it in three dif­fer­ent browsers.  Even­tu­ally I realised that the post­code field didn’t work prop­erly if you tabbed through too quickly and was not detect­ing my post­code — pretty frus­trat­ing.  How­ever when I tried it again this week I didn’t have the same prob­lems so per­haps it has been fixed, or is related to the com­puter I was on at the time.

The rest of the order­ing process went fairly smoothly, and it wasn’t dif­fi­cult to find the prod­ucts I needed to order.  I set the items to be deliv­ered the next day — a Sat­ur­day morn­ing, between 9am and 12am.

Just before 12 when I was begin­ning to won­der when my gro­ceries would arrive, I received a call to say the dri­ver was run­ning late and would take another half an hour or so. This was not a prob­lem as I didn’t need to leave the house until 4pm. Some time passed, then I received another call stat­ing the dri­ver was run­ning even more late. In all the dri­ver was over an hour late.  Again, this didn’t worry me as I didn’t need to go any­where just yet, but it could have been a colos­sal pain if I had to go out ear­lier in the afternoon.

The other down­side to the late deliv­ery I didn’t notice until I was unpack­ing.  The ice-cream I had ordered was almost com­pletely thawed and soft right to the mid­dle.  Thank­fully (as you can see from the review) it still tasted fine, but I was glad I had not ordered more cold items, and won­dered why the deliv­ery vans did not have ade­quate cool­ing if they could be delayed for so long.

How else did it dif­fer from Coles Online?

There are not as many pay­ment options, which was a dis­ap­point­ment as I pre­fer to use Mobile EFTPOS — but a credit card, debit card or gift card at the time of order seemed to be the only options available.

Deliv­ery pay­ments are also dif­fer­ent and depend on the amount ordered rather than the times­lot. Orders up to $99.00 cost $13.00 for deliv­ery, $100–149.99 costs $9.00, $150–199.99 costs $7.00, $200–249.99 costs $5.00, and orders over $250.00 are deliv­ered free.  There­fore my order cost $7.00 to deliver.

The Wool­worths invoice is not only itemised like the Coles invoice, but organ­ised into dif­fer­ent sec­tions (eg Bak­ing, Condi­ments, Frozen Food) which made it eas­ier to check off the items to make sure they had arrived.

I also found that there were more items that I could not find in the store that were avail­able online. Per­haps this was due to my unfa­mil­iar­ity with the store com­pared to Coles, but I searched for a long time with­out luck.

What about the price comparison?

I took my invoice to the local Wool­worths store in Toowong to com­pare the online prices the same way I had com­pared them for Coles.  The store prices were cheaper in gen­eral, although this time it was a sneaky 7% rather than the 8% at Coles, and wasn’t as con­sis­tent.  There were some online items that were not even on sale that were still much cheaper.  And once again, I took advan­tage of the online spe­cials, which were usu­ally between 30–50% off the store prices.  This meant that my online pur­chases were $14.00 cheaper than the store price, eas­ily cov­er­ing the $7.00 deliv­ery fee.

You can check the prices your­self in this spread­sheet.  (Please let me know if you find any errors!)

The final verdict?

Over­all, although Wool­worths did turn out to have less dif­fer­ence between their online and in store prices, I still pre­fer Coles Online.  The abil­ity to pay with Mobile EFTPOS, as well as the late deliv­ery from Wool­worths are the main rea­sons, although it’s still a pretty close deci­sion.  If Wool­worths were to add a Mobile EFTPOS pay­ment option (or even bet­ter — Pay­pal) I would def­i­nitely give them another go.

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