Online grocery shopping

[daisya]

Just wondered what opinions are on this:

Asda grocery shopping site used to have the "end of" dates for promotional offers. For instance: Butter £1.20 buy 2 for £1.70 offer ends 20:09:11 That was great because going by the date you have chosen for delivery you would know whether to order that promotion or not. Sometimes promotions ordered were just because they were promotions or on special (who doesn't love a bargain?). However, they have since stopped putting the "offer ends on..." so when you order you have no idea if the items you have ordered will be at the promotional price or not. When delivered they can then come through at the original price (offer finished), and you have the choice as to keep them or return them to store!

I feel that's not on especially as they used to include the end dates. Tesco online will give the end date of their promotions and will even tell you if that offer ends before the delivery you've chosen so it gives customer choice to remove the item if you wish. IMO it seems that where the "end of" promotion date is not displayed it is relying on shopper apathy (can't be bothered to take it back for refund), therefore the supermarket gains by not putting the date on the site.

Have others had experience of this and what do you think, should offers have end of date so that you have the information to decide if you are going to buy at special price or not?

[daisya]

Just bumping this up, hope someone has a comment please....

[LibranLass]

Hello, you can go to my supermarket and browse around and click on any product and it will show you the prices at all the main supermarkets and where an item is on offer you will see the end date. Here is a link.

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

[~Wingnut~]

We stayed loyal to ASDA for far too long, they made many mistakes with our food shopping final straw was them not delivering and not ringing to tell us even tho the store is only about 4 miles away. We changed to Tesco about March time, spend about £75 a week on shopping and in that time we have saved so many clubcard tokens that by crimbo I will be able to prob get a week or 2 shopping for nothing!! ASDA just don't offer the same rewards, if you can I would recommend switching to Tesco. Tesco btw tell you when your picking your items if that offer will be valid for when you have ordered it to be delivered.

[daisya]

Thanks for your answers, I;ll have a look at the link later LL. I think my time will come with Asda wingnut it's just that they are only a couple of miles from me and if anything needs returning it is easy to do. I will write to their head office over my complaint about the promo's and see what they say. I am so annoyed with Asda because they used to have those dates on there, makes me very cynical about them because by them not having them on the site it means the customers are losing out! Will look at Tesco soon I think.

[Huderon]

I agree that they should make it obvious when an offer ends for online customers, but with a bit of knowledge you can, to some extent, get round the problem.

Most of the chains have their changeovers on Wednesday, so if you are buying on Tuesday for delivery on Wednesday, say, there is a chance you'll miss out on the offer. That means that the best time to do your on line shopping is From Wednesday on, and never shop during the early part of the week for delivery after Tuesday.

Most promotions last for 4 weeks (in Co-Op stores it's 3 weeks), occasionally there are shorter promotions (one week, a weekend, while stocks last) but most of them are for 4 weeks.

Boots and Superdrug do changeovers every two weeks (half the store at a time, but the offers on each half still run for 4 weeks, if that makes sense).

If you are in the store yourself, you can check the promotion end dates easily enough if you know where to look, and what to look for - the stores don't always make it obvious when a promotion ends. The trick is to look closely at the "barkers" (the large offer cards that are usually attached to the edge of shelves). The dates covered by an offer are usually at the bottom, in tiny print, often tucked in with other coded stuff for the chain.

In Sainsbury's for example there will be two dates - the start and end dates - separated by a / whereas in Boots the dates are, if memory serves, separated by a hyphen. You still have to look closely - I think one of those two does the dates in ddmmyyy format and the other does them in yyymmdd format. Superdrug usually have an "offer ends dd/mm/yyyy" bit, but it's still pretty small print. Co-Op have something similar, but a lot of those small stores are not good when it comes to putting up shelf advertising.

I don't know what Asda or Tesco do as it's ages since I was in either of those chains.

Some stores are not always up to date with their promotions and either don't have promotional material out or leave it up after the promotion has expired. If you pick up something which still has promotional material on display, even if the offer has expired, argue it - one of the managers will usually override the till and give you the promotion, then leg it to the shelf and remove the promotional material before it costs them too much.

The same thing can happen with shelf edge labels - new stock comes in with a higher price on the packaging, but they don't change the price on the shelf edge to match. Again, it's worth arguing it (you can always say you didn't notice the price on the packaging, unless it's blindingly obvious !) and you might get it at the lower price.

It's also worth checking multibuys on packaged items - I've seen a multibuy on packs of 40 tea bags which worked out more expensive than the 80 pack of the same brand before now (the larger pack was also on promotion, but just a price reduction and it wasn't as obvious as the multibuy).

[daisya]

Thanks for all your details and information Huderon, very useful. The trouble I have is Asda always used to have the end by date on their web site whereby you could then adjust your delivery date to suit if you wanted that offer, or not bother but at least you knew. I really don't want to have to go into the store to check up on the dates because then I might just as well shop then and it's difficult if you have mobility problems. I am just so annoyed that they have taken away the online shoppers' choice of buying a special offer just because you can't see an end date. If you go into store to shop you pay the price on the shelf and that's fine of course, but to withdraw the information when they always had it is rather annoying to say the least. Tesco have the information on their site so I will have to buy from them instead, I don't want to keep returning items because I bought at a lower price online only for it having gone back to original price when delivered.