Tesco Online Website

Tonight I'm going to talk about a subject dear to my heart. The tesco online website.

Oh dear.

Those of us in the UK will be familiar with Tesco, one of, if not the biggest UK food superstore chain. Many of us in the UK shop often shop online for our food rather than going to the store. Alright I'm lazy .. but I also don't drive, and carting back a huge shopping haul on a bike is not pleasant. So I am more than happy to pay the 5 quid or so delivery charge to have someone do this for me.

I first started using sainsburys online service, and was quite happy with it. However, I find sainsburys tend to be a bit expensive overall (for myself, I'm not so bothered about paying for premium quality) so I moved over to tesco.

I am usually very impressed by the way tesco picks my food in the store for me and delivers it with nice drivers, doing what can't be a super pleasant job. I am very happy with the service, apart from in one area - the website!

The tesco online website is SO BAD, it's almost beyond belief. Alright it looks very nice, but the problem is, it DOESN'T WORK. Now I'm not a complete newbie to website design myself, I've written several, and have a reasonable knowledge of web technology such as html, css, php and sql.

I am currently stuck tonight with no food, having for the umpteenth time spent over an hour attempting to shop at the website. My main web browser is firefox (like 20% or so of web surfers), and I have a totally up to date install and disabled all plugins (to give tesco online the benefit of the doubt).

If I'm lucky, I can login to the site. However, when I click on a link, for example to show 'my favourites' in order to place my order, 99% of the time the website just hangs. If I click the link again sometimes the site gets very confused indeed, and tries to download an .aspx file to my computer. No, I don't want an .aspx file, I would like to see the website, thank you very much.

After 15 mins trying this and getting nowhere I give up and fireup internet explorer, which I keep for situations like this. I have version 6 of IE (perhaps this is where I am slipping up, not being interested in updating more microsoft bloatware). With all the security turned down to minimum, internet explorer fails to even load the front page :( . Sometimes I have got further with IE on the tesco site, but not tonight.

I went back to firefox. By a stroke of luck I managed to be able to add some items to my shopping cart. My prebooked delivery slot had long since disappeared, probably due to me having to log in multiple times, and delete my cache repeatedly to get anything to load.

So my message to Tesco, the company would be simple. Whoever is in charge of your website, fire them. They are guilty of gross incompetance. A child could build a more servicable website. The problem is probably in part due to the use of .NET type microsoft software in combination with incompetant website design. If you please could, given the huge amount of profit you make every day, please please please hire some competant web designers to make you a working website.

I would advise writing one that doesn't rely on proven unworkable technology, and instead opt for something more commonly used and proven to be scalable. If you really can't do it, I'd probably write the website for you, free of charge, or gladly instruct your website team on the basics of software development.

Here's hoping.

P.S. I may end up having to go back to sainsburys or a competitor who has a website that works. I know this means nothing in the grand scheme of things, and probably tesco online sales are a very small proportion of their operation, but I really like the rest of their system, it just makes me incredibly sad that a large corporation with so many resources can get something so horribly, horribly wrong. :(