I was surprised and delighted today to see a poster for woolworths.co.uk! The brand is back - but now owned by Shop Direct, the owner of Littlewoods.

I’ve just checked out their website (which doesn’t work unless you use www.!) and have mixed feelings about how the site will do.

I feel Woolworths worked as the shop in every small town across Britain that had everything you needed - no matter how random. Growing up, before Tesco came along and took over the world, if you needed something, you just went to Woolworths and they’d probably have it! They were convienience, they were tangible… I never took to their website in the same way. They were never really an online presence to me - they didn’t compete with the big online boys. If I wanted books or music, I’d go to Amazon/CD Wow/Play.com. If I wanted electronics I’d go to the same or to John Lewis or Currys/Comet/Dixons. However, I must say, when I did go to Woolworths online, they were generally the cheapest. Oh - may be that was their problem…

Their site now is relying solely on the brand. The home page etc isn’t particularly search engine optimised and neither are the category pages. Product pages are ok - but it takes a while to get to them in some categories, and in other categories it just looks like a basic, staid catalogue. This wouldn’t be so bad if the design made up for it - but it looks quite quickly thrown together and is quite lacking - plenty of orange (?!) space that could have been filled more nicely.

I find it a little bit odd that I can view on a map where other people are shopping - of all the cool interactive features they could have added I’m not sure that one’s a real points winner. The Very Important Families concept is nice though, with a smart flash animation. Shop with Woolies and get free Saturday morning Cinema tickets.

What is more fun is the Pick N’ Mix option - for some reason on it’s own domain woolworthsparty.co.uk. Despite clicking on a big icon on the main Woolworths home page to go to Pick and Mix, I then had to spend a few seconds looking around the find the pick and mix on this site… it’s just got a tab along the top menu, when your eye is being drawn to the big graphics and categories depicted below.

When you get there though - the flash ordering system does it’s best to recreate the fun of choosing your Pick and Mix for real. Of course there’s only so much a website can recreate, but at least it’s not as basic as clicking on it and adding it to your basket - you actually see the sweets flow into your bag. You have to select your sweet, so it moves over your bag - then you have to click on the sweets again to get them into your order… perhaps some more instructions would be useful here.

Their delivery prices for Pick N’ Mix are good - £1.50 for orders under £5, and £3.95 for orders over £5. Ok - often delivery gets less with bulk, but how they’ve done it makes perfect sense for their model. You don’t want to spend £4 to get a couple of quids worth of sweets delivered! Delivery for the normal shop is £3.95 for a next day service, or you can pick what day you’d like it delivered on. Larger items may cost more.

I hope the Woolworths brand lives on! I’m not sure quite how much Pick N’ Mix they’ll sell online, but I wish them the best of luck with it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under online shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.