Waitrose updates online shopping platform

Friday, October 11, 2013 - 10:29 by Sarah Collinson

Supermarket giant, Waitrose, has revised its approach to e-commerce, with a fresh set of tools to help its customers make purchases online.

The Grocer reports that the update was rolled out earlier this week, which led to a short period of planned downtime, before the site re-launched with the new features in place.

One of the capabilities which is now available to users is called the multi-search jotter, which is basically a way to let you enter an entire shopping list into the site's search function and then add the relevant items to your basket.

This should speed up the process of ordering groceries via safe shopping online, which is always a good thing for consumers who do not have much free time available to them.

The site also has a new function that lets you `favourite' certain items, which can then be added to orders quickly from a list of your most regularly purchased products.

Forgetfulness can be an issue when buying online, since you are not always put face to face with the items you might normally purchase. Waitrose's way of addressing this is to show users a list of products they usually add to their basket before they go through with the checkout process, so that they do not miss out on anything.

Users will also receive an alert if they have included one item which is part of a multi-buy deal in their basket, but have not added the necessary extras to help them take advantage of any potential savings.

Waitrose may not have quite the same online presence as larger rivals, such as Tesco and Sainsbury's, but the updates to its e-commerce service should help it to keep existing customers and attract new shoppers in the coming months.