Tesco Lotus in Bangkok has just announced they will be offering online grocery shopping and home delivery in Thailand in the next few months. In fact, if everything goes to plan, Tesco Lotus customers should be able to use the company’s website to order groceries online and then arrange to have them delivered to their home by the end of the year. A mobile app will soon follow. All I can say is “Wahoooooo”.
While, of course, many consumers don’t mind going to Tesco Lotus anywhere in Thailand to pick up their weekly shop, and some of us in fact love it, there are days when, for whatever reason, grocery shopping is just a huge chore. That’s why having the ability to order your groceries online at Tesco’s website and then get one of Tesco’s delivery vans to bring them to you is, for people like me, an absolute godsend.
I work a lot of hours online and, when I run out of milk or vegetables for my rabbits, it’s sometimes a huge hassle to have to get showered and dressed, take a motorcycle taxi to Tesco, do my grocery shopping and then take a taxi home. It takes several hours out of my day– hours I should be working.
That’s why, when the Tesco Lotus online grocery shopping program starts up and I can buy food online, I’ll likely be one of the very first registering.
Tesco Lotus is already at the forefront of the online shopping and home delivery market in other global markets, with the ability to do so already ongoing in countries like the UK and Poland. Thailand will be only the second Asian market to have online shopping and home delivery from Tesco though, (South Korea was the first), and that decision was made as so many Thais now use smart phones or spend hours a month online.
As for Tesco Lotus in Thailand, it looks like they have been closely watching the Japanese market too,where arranging for home delivery of your supermarket order is becoming incredibly popular with people in their 20s and 30s.
As Thais tend to copy just about everything the Japanese do, Tesco must have realized it’s only a matter of time before Thai consumers are clammering for the ability to order groceries online in Bangkok and elsewhere in Thailand — a service it seems Tesco Lotus will soon be happy to provide.