Tesco announces strategy for online growth

Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - 10:29 by Simon Crisp

Last week supermarket giant, Tesco, announced plans which it hopes will allow it to come back from the sales slump it has entered in recent years and reenergise its business to address flagging footfall in its bricks and mortar stores.

Shopping online will be a key part of this strategy, since of course, more and more British consumers are choosing to select their groceries online and get them delivered direct to their doors rather than visit a real world outlet and trawl through the items on each aisle, for hours on end.

Click & collect has also changed the way that people shop, since people can now order a full week's worth of food shopping online and then collect it the same day at the supermarket of their choice.

In the long term, Tesco said that it is hoping to expand its role in the UK's market for safe shopping online, while also refocusing its bricks and mortar tactics, to make convenience stores a bigger priority. Rivals like Sainsbury?s have shown that this can be an effective way to keep sales up, even as consumers are beginning to shun big, out of town outlets.

Tesco additionally revealed that it will be making major investments in fuelling its price war with rivals, which will mean that it is going to try and undercut other supermarkets on prices, even if this means it has to take a bit of a hit.

Tesco has not been the only major retailer to take a knock in the past half decade, as a combination of shopping online and the credit crunch damaged consumer confidence and made more people look to the web, where prices are lower. Making a mark online is the only way that companies like this can hope to survive.