UK supermarket giving Amazon a run for its money with new online marketplace (2024)

Amazon is often a go-to for online shoppers as you can buy just about anything and everything on the site, from beauty products, to clothes, homeware, and even parts for your car.

But it seems a top UK supermarket is looking to give Amazon a run for its money, as the retailer has launched its own online marketplace.

Tesco’s Marketplace is up and running with around 9,000 products for sale across DIY, homeware, toys, gardening, and petcare.

The new items can be found on Tesco.com and on the Tesco app alongside traditional groceries, but they are sold by third-party suppliers and are paid for separately to your regular food shop.

Marketplace items incur their own delivery fees. However, customers are able to earn Clubcard points on all purchases.

At the time of the launch around 17 sellers are featured on the marketplace, and these include brands such as Tefal, Tommee Tippee, Silentnight, and Charles Bentley.

Tesco says it’ll be monitoring the sellers on Marketplace to ensure they meet ‘robust standards’, keeping tabs on the delivery speed, delivery success, returns, and customer reviews.

And plans are already in place to expand the marketplace offering over the coming months, growing until ultimately becomes ‘a one-stop shop for everything customers need’.

Peter Filcek, Marketplace director at Tesco, says the idea for the Marketplace came from customers, as they had been searching the supermarket website for items that the retailer didn’t carry in stores or online.

‘That prompted a stream of thinking around what we could do to open up that range, to give customers what they’re looking for because they were genuinely looking for all sorts of things,’ he told The Grocer.

‘We’re not able to meet really quantified customer demand in a way that we could never mobilise a retail supply chain to do. So we’ll go where the customers tell us to go.’

He added: ‘We want to go big enough that we are a destination. But not so big that [shoppers] end up tripping over irrelevant stuff and it becomes a problem and gets in their way.’

This isn’t the first time Tesco has had its own online marketplace, with the retailer previously launching Tesco Direct in 2006, offering non-food items on the website.

Tesco Direct was up and running until 2018, when it ceased trading as the company couldn’t find a way to make it profitable.

Former Tesco boss, Charles Wilson, said at the time: ‘This decision has been a very difficult one to make, but it is an essential step towards establishing a more sustainable non-food offer and growing our business for the future.

‘We want to offer our customers the ability to buy groceries and non-food products in one place and that’s why we are focusing our investment into one online platform.’

This comes after Tesco recently made a major change to one of its most popular grocery items.

In a bid to be more eco-friendly the retailer will be removing stickers from some of its avocados and using lasers to ‘tattoo’ information onto the skin as part of a trial.

The high-powered lasers will remove a tiny section of the top layer of skin and etch size information onto the avocado, with all of this being completed in a third of a second.

Tesco claims that by doing this, they could stop using nearly a million plastic stickers on loose extra large avocados, based on current sales information.

Westfalia Fruit, which supplies avocados to Tesco, says these avocados are the perfect product for the trial due to the thickness of the outer skin.

The Spalding-based avocado company has been conducting extensive trials of their own to ensure that the quality, shelf life, and taste of the green fruit isn’t impacted by the laser.

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