The new Groceries iPhone app from Tesco means you can scan items wherever you are and add them to your online shop. Genius way to save time or geeky gimmick? You decide…
Picture this – you’re at a friend’s house eating some tasty snacks that you can’t wait to buy yourself.
Just scan the packet with your iPhone and – poof – it’s added to your online order like magic.
Or you’re at home scraping the last of the Marmite out of the jar. Don’t forget to add it to your order – just scan it and it’s yours.
Thanks to a new app from Tesco, these scenarios are now not as crazy as they might sound. The downside? You need an iPhone and a Tesco online shopping account to benefit.
But is this something that people really want to use? Tesco.com’s chief executive Laura Wade-Gery obviously thinks so, insisting, “This is the perfect solution for iPhone lovers that are always forgetting to add items to their shopping list or haven’t the time to even write one.”
This is undoubtedly the appeal for me. I’m an obsessive shopping-list writer and spend a good 15 minutes going through my cupboards and fridge-freezer to see what’s nearly empty before I head to the shops.
My perfect app would scan the items onto a list I could take with me, but I can see how online shoppers could save heaps of time by simply scanning the contents of their cupboards. Beats searching online anyday.
As with any new app, there’s bound to be teething problems so we thought we’d give it a test run on a few items we gathered from staff desks. Once you get the hang of holding the item the right way round, scanning is a doddle. We scanned five items and it recognised three, but wasn’t sure about the Orbit chewing gum or Twinings peppermint tea.
Let’s just hope these mystery items don’t lead to crazy substitutions like those we found in a recent investigation into online shopping. Getting chocolate pudding when you wanted black pudding isn’t what the app ordered.
Loading ...
