Tesco winning Christmas online battle
Christmas, with two thirds of online grocery shoppers buying from
the retail giant's website, according to new research.
Internet shoppers are looking for convenience and speed this Christmas, with a quarter of them opting to buy their Christmas groceries online.
According to a survey carried out by Nielsen/NetRatings 69 per cent of internet shoppers in the UK will buy them from Tesco.
Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, said "When it comes to online consumers, Tesco will no doubt be delighted to hear how well it is performing compared to its competitors - being more than twice as popular as its nearest rival Asda and three times more popular than its traditional rival Sainsbury's."
The survey shows that the food industry is the latest success story of online retailing - research analysts at Verdict predict that the UK online food retail sector will grow 3.9 per cent to be worth £4.5 billion by 2010.
Tesco.com's sales figures verify such predictions with a sales growth of 24.1 per cent to £719million and an increase in profits of 51.8 per cent to £36m in 2004.
Tesco launched its home delivery service in 1999 and now delivers 170,000 grocery orders a week and covers 97 per cent of the UK.
Nielsen/NetRatings also discovered that the second week in December is the most common period for online Christmas food shopping with over a third of respondents purchasing then.
But around 8 per cent of shoppers will still be doing online grocery shopping in the final days before Christmas.
The research also examined the Christmas shopping patterns of men and women - it found that 33 per cent of women shop for groceries online compared to only 18 per cent of men.
The popularity of the supermarkets remained consistent across the genders with only Iceland performing notably different - being the fourth most popular supermarket for women but only the seventh for men.
