Iceland Foods to up e-shopping share

Food retailer Iceland is investing £2.4m in data warehousing to analyse its customers' online buying habits as it bids to up its share of their internet shopping basket.

Iceland is working with NCR to implement its Teradata-based Worldmark servers to replace 37 separate management information systems.

"We wanted one version of the truth across the whole group to get a single view of what customers are buying across all our channels," said Martin Chatwin, information systems director at Iceland Foods.

The company re-branded itself as Iceland.co.uk in March in the hope of establishing itself as a leading online supermarket.

"The average order size on the internet is six times that in store, and is 20 per cent higher than orders placed through our call centre. Internet ordering is already equivalent to four or five new stores at 10 per cent of the cost," said Chatwin.

Iceland currently receives 10,000 internet orders per week, at an average of £60 per order. It lags behind the most successful online grocer, Tesco.com, which takes over £5m worth of orders each week.

First published in Computing

See also:

Iceland freezes loss-making online service

Frozen food supermarket to concentrate or core business  06 Apr 2005

Satisfied web customers don't come cheap

The internet gives better access to customers, but keeping them satisfied is more complex.  20 Mar 2000

Iceland sells eco-friendly fridges online

Frozen food specialist Iceland has added environmentally friendly fridges and freezers to the range of products it already sells online.  08 Feb 2000

Is Sainsbury's shopping bill big enough?

Sainsbury's forthcoming £30 million investment in an online shopping service is the minimum needed to catch its competitors, writes Simon Goodley. The embattled supermarket revealed details of the move as US jeans maker Levi Strauss said it is pulling out of web retail.  04 Nov 1999

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