Aldi Enters E-Commerce Market for First Time

Friday, April 17, 2020 - 12:44 by Mike Price

Budget supermarket chain Aldi has started to sell grocery products via safe shopping online in the UK after years of steering clear of this marketplace, with the impact of the coronavirus prompting it to give customers the option of home delivery so that they do not need to venture out to its bricks and mortar stores.

Rather than giving customers a full selection of different items to choose from, Aldi is focusing on providing parcels priced at £25 which will contain a number of essentials, including toiletries as well as canned goods.

Anyone who wants to place an order will only be able to buy one of these parcels at a time, according to Internet Retailing. This should help to ensure that there is enough stock to go around, with Aldi following in the footsteps of Morrisons in this approach to supplying groceries.

Company spokesperson Fritz Walleczek said that Aldi’s aim was to make food available at affordable prices and with the greatest level of safety for its customers, particularly during a point in time where it is not possible for certain people to leave the house, let alone visit physical retail stores.

It is worth noting that Aldi is not jumping headfirst into the e-commerce market without any experience, as it has been selling alcohol and some other one-off sale items through its website in recent years. This means that it does have some infrastructure in place to convert to selling groceries for home delivery.

Aldi has big expansion plans for its UK operations, with almost 900 existing stores nationally and a further 300 openings on the cards in the next half-decade. Now that it is competing in the online space it will pose an even bigger threat to other mainstream supermarket chains.