A Well-Established & Profitable Brick & Mortar Business: A retail chain started by selling grocery from 1919, Tesco grew organically and inorganically over the time. Like its counterpart Wal Mart and Target, it started transferring the savings gained by volume purchase to its customers and gained instant popularity.

Amazing Ground Work: It was a very obvious observation for TESCO, that to go online, its customers should have access to Internet. TESCO decided to provide broad-band services and soon became well-known ISP. With this, it became first retailer who was also an ISP. TESCO also did intensive analysis on the profitability of the business model.

Running Pilot Model First: TESCO started pilot model in one of the London store, a very basic website was designed and the model was a combination of telephone, fax and Internet. After successful broad-band business and encouraging results from its pilot project, TESCO started providing online shopping in many of its London-based stores.

Efficient Operation: Once customer has ordered the merchandising, items would be picked up from store by employees and delivered to the customer.

High Focus on Technology: TESCO was very clear that its technology has to be the best to provide amazing customer experience not only in terms of website navigation but also in terms of speed. It went on to the extent to produce updated CDs and supply them to its customers so that they can add items to their basket and then connect to Internet by dial-up connection to just place the order.

Geographic Expansion of e-Tailing: Tesco made sure that it sticks to the basics for expanding its e-tailing. It targeted places like South Korea, where Internet use is high and where high-speed web connections abound, enabling the grocer's jam-packed pages to download quickly.

Going That Extra Step: TESCO went one step beyond when it enabled Tesco.net for visually-challenged people. Blinds could now purchase online with the help of speech recognition systems. The system, which the company developed along with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), uses technology that converts text to speech, describing products on the company's TESCO Direct website and guiding consumers through the buying process.

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* Contributed by: -
Saurabh Shukla is II Year Student of PGDSM-MIT (Batch 2007-09) at S. P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai. Had previously worked at Infosys Technologies Ltd. for 3.5 Years.
Article posted on January 25, 2009.