East Ivanhoe Grocers, a FoodWorks branded supermarket, has launched the company’s first metropolitan online grocery store.
The Melbourne-based grocer has teamed up with online supermarket systems provider, Myfoodlink, to offer its full product range of more than 12,000 lines online.
“We see grocery deliveries as an essential service in our community, there are lots of older people and busy families who want to have their groceries delivered, but they also want top quality merchandise and reliable and friendly services,” Paul Schroeder, owner of East Ivanhoe Grocers, said.
“We have always offered phone orders but they are not very efficient for many people. Being able to browse the store and choose items at your own pace is ideal – our customers are already starting to place their orders online,” Schroeder said.
Online food shopping is a growing sector of the Australian grocery market, with a recent Neilsen report showed that 35 per cent of Australians had purchased groceries online in the previous month, but this still lags behind other international markets such as the UK where the figure is more than 40 per cent.
To date the major supermarkets have led the conversion to the online grocery channel in Australia, however, with the increasing availability of affordable online software systems the independents are now catching up.
“Up until now it has been just too expensive for the independents to develop the technology to trade online. We now expect to see most of the independent and specialist grocers moving online, giving Australian consumers a much greater choice,” said Nathan Males, CEO of Myfoodlink.
“We are already working with many of the Australian leading FoodWorks and IGA groups and expect to launch at least 50 online supermarkets throughout Australia during 2014,” said Males.