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Online Stores: Woolworths Online

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.

Online Stores: Coles Online

Online Stores: Coles Online 1

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

I’ve been buy­ing things on the inter­net for many years, but it had never really crossed my mind to buy gro­ceries online as well.  There is a super­mar­ket not far from me, and despite not hav­ing a car, I always found the time to walk or take a train or taxi to the stores to get what I needed (and walk­ing is def­i­nitely a good way to dis­cour­age you from buy­ing too much!)  How­ever some­times when I was home sick with flu, it would have been nice to have some­one turn up at the door with a fresh box of tis­sues and a bot­tle of orange juice.

So why haven’t I tried online gro­cery shop­ping until now?
I think I assumed it would be a has­sle, would cost a for­tune to deliver every­thing, and the time between the order and the deliv­ery would be days or a week (when most times I wanted my gro­ceries quickly).

And why try it now?

The main rea­son is that I wanted to refresh the pot­ted plants on my veran­dah, and it’s not really prac­ti­cal to haul a big bag of pot­ting mix back from the shops on foot.  I also needed to restock my canned goods and a few other heavy items.  My usual option would be to take a taxi back from the shops (usu­ally cost­ing under $10.00) but the wait for a taxi that may or may not turn up is frustrating.

What’s the verdict?

I chose Coles Online because I know they already have the range of prod­ucts I prefer.

I found it supris­ingly easy and fast.  I ordered my goods on a Sat­ur­day before lunch, and had them deliv­ered at 9.30am the next morn­ing.  They only had one bag of pot­ting mix avail­able (I ordered 2) but they emailed me on the Sat­ur­day after­noon to let me know.  If I had ticked the but­ton to allow sub­stite brands, they would have replaced it with another brand, but as I’m fairly picky about brands I left it unticked.  Which was lucky because one bag of pot­ting mix turned out to be plenty!  All the other items on my list arrived as ordered, and when unpack­ing I dis­cov­ered a bonus bag of bananas that I didn’t order (so some­body may have been miss­ing their bananas, but I didn’t think it worth report­ing — bananas don’t cost a mort­gage any­more and they made some lovely banana scones).

What about the cost?

Deliv­ery costs depend on what time you book (busier times are more expen­sive I pre­sume).  My deliv­ery cost $7.00 and the high­est price I saw on the book­ing screen was $12.00.

How­ever, I did won­der how the prices would com­pare to the prices in my local store.  So later that week I took my itemised bill to the store and checked the prices.

The results showed that over­all the online prices were more expen­sive than those in the local store at Toowong.  I know that prices between stores can vary, so that could be taken into account, but since the government’s Gro­ceryChoice web­site no longer exists, it’s not easy to check on aver­age price dif­fer­ences between stores with­out phys­i­cally going to each one (although if you are curi­ous, a full list of gro­ceries and their prices can be found linked at the end of this arti­cle — please let us know if you com­pare prices how your local store fared!).  But the fact is that over­all, prices were around 8% more expen­sive online.

Over­all, how­ever that only amounts to a dif­fer­ence of $7.50 on a $171.00 gro­cery list, partly because I had taken advan­tage of some good online spe­cials, which reduced the dif­fer­ence in price.  If you fac­tor that small dif­fer­ence into your online pur­chas­ing, and the fuel/transport fees you would nor­mally spend on shop­ping (as well as the time push­ing trol­lies and wrest­ing bags) then it still works out as a fairly good deal.

Would you buy online again?

Yes, I think I would, but not all the time.  I don’t mind the time taken to browse the shelves and it’s a good excuse to go for a walk.  But when I need to restock my tinned goods or other heavy items, I will prob­a­bly use it again.

I would sug­gest though that if you do buy online, check the spe­cials and stock up on any reduced price items that you need.  That will help bal­ance out the dif­fer­ence in price, and the online spe­cials were often much cheaper than instore prices.

You can view an itemised list com­par­ing the prices here.

Adden­dum

I realise I for­got to men­tion the pay­ment options in this arti­cle. Coles Online allow you to pay by either Credit Card at time of order, or using Mobile EFTPOS when then deliv­ery arrives. I’m amaz­ing I for­got to men­tion this as I hate using my credit card unless it’s absolutely nec­es­sary, so it was great to be able to pay by EFTPOS as I nor­mally would when buy­ing in the store. How handy this was only became obvi­ous to me when buy­ing from stores that do not have this option!