Online shopping a hit
A humble South Auckland store served as ground zero for the launch of online shopping back in the 1990s.
The Countdown supermarket chain is this year celebrating the 20th anniversary of a service established at what was then Foodtown Manurewa.
It was one of the best performing supermarkets in New Zealand at the time and it became the centre of a small 100-customer online shopping trial in 1996.
When it began, customers had to load the online shopping programme on to their home com-
puter using up to 12 floppy disks.
They then had to connect via dial-up internet and wait up to a minute for each product to load.
More than 80,000 Kiwis now use the service regularly, placing 20,000 orders each week.
Countdown’s head of online shopping Sally Copland says the technology used in the service has evolved in the past 20 years.
‘‘In 1996 only 25 per cent of Kiwi households had a computer, compared with 91 per cent today.
‘‘Finding information online wasn’t second nature like it is now, let alone shopping for your groceries.’’
But customer demand for online shopping was strong even in the early days and the company has focused on refining the service to make it ‘‘easier, faster and more convenient’’, Copland says.
‘‘We’ve … introduced innovations like quick-lists, incorporating individual Onecard data to display what products a shopper typically orders, adding more frequent delivery times and introducing a nationwide ‘click and collect’ option.’’
Countdown Westfield Manukau worker Colleen Ihaka has seen all the changes first-hand.
As one of the supermarket’s original personal shoppers she starts each shift at 5am and fills about 12 online orders a day.
Ihaka says she loves her job because she likes to see the different tastes her customers have.
Twenty years ago it took up to an hour for each order to be completed but now it’s done in just eight minutes.
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