Korea’s Tesco reinvents grocery shopping with QR-code “stores” | Hacker News Reader

Korea’s Tesco reinvents grocery shopping with QR-code “stores”

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74 pointsmattraibert25 comments

Tesco (which is actually a British chain that operates in Korea rather than a Korean chain) has been leading online grocery shopping for a long time. It first offered Videotex Teleshopping in 1984 and was the first to offer internet shopping in 1996.

It's online store Tesco.com is the largest online grocery store in the world (largely driven by the fact that online grocery shopping is much more mainstream in the UK compared to most other markets)

They're trialling a lot of interesting tech at the moment (API, in-store GPS for finding products, etc.). One of their major competitors Ocado makes 10% of their income through iPhone "scan-and-shop" orders so it's definitely a huge market.

Having just placed my fortnightly shop using Ocado's excellent iPad app, I think wandering round the kitchen/bathroom to check what I still have during the process of buying new stuff is the most compelling use for the iPad I've yet found.

Yep. I think Tesco and Ocado both use the Redlaser barcode scanning sdk in thier IOS apps http://redlaser.com/sdk/

This is FAKE!

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/48... [updated with English article]

But it's a really cool, fun idea :) grocery shopping while waiting for the subway. It's one of the coolest concepts for a subway ad I've seen.

can you tl;dr the article?

i gave up on making sense of the translation when it mentions "'K (K) -9' self-propelled artillery".

Actually, that translation was accurate. :)

I found an English version of this article at http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/48...

Basically, they put up this ad in a subway for a couple hours at night, filmed it, and then took it down.

All the while, I thought this was true! I didn't know this was fake. But, I agree. This is a very very awesome idea. I would want to have something like this near here. It really fits my lifestyle.

A more advanced version would look like this: Tesco would install digital walls/displays all over the city (country) and control all the displays remotely. The city would earn nice money from renting the display space to Tesco.

Perhaps one of the best ideas I've ever seen in action. A much better "browsing" (in the shopping sense of browsing) experience than just flipping through a list of items on your phone.

The best part is that it gets delivered to your home. So you can literally shop while waiting for the next train, and there's a good chance the groceries will arrive not too long after you get home.

I don't see why they need to use the trick with the walls at all. Why can't the consumers do online shopping from their smartphones directly?

Much of the shopping experience could be replicated online if people used large enough photos. The postage stamp sized photos that many sites use are really stupid. So if you're building an online shopping site give me big juicy full screen photos.

I think it would be a real cool concept if I could upload my list ahead of time or have my groceries retrieved from a conveyer belt at the market that's automatically retrieved similar to how Amazon's automated distribution systems work. Of course, I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap or practical for actual use.

1. Very tired of seeing this float around. I expect more from HN. (Here come the downvotes. So be it.)

2. This is a terrible, terrible idea. If you've got a smartphone, you'd just shop online. Maybe while you're riding the train.

3. It's fake? That would make so much more sense.

> 2. This is a terrible, terrible idea. If you've got a smartphone, you'd just shop online. Maybe while you're riding the train.

Well not really. The billboards serve as advertisements, that you just happent to also be able to shop from.

I can't remember the last billboard I saw that required me to bend down to look at it.

You bend down to recognize a product near waist height? My friend, you need glasses.

Not downvoting, but I just wanted to say that I thought this article was relevant. I'm disappointed that it's fake, but an article about novel new ways that people can interact with vendors using their smart phones seems like pretty standard hacker news.

Especially amongst all the repetitive articles about software patents, bitcoins and google+. Don't get me wrong, I think all those things are interesting hacker news, I was just trying to add diversity.

I'm assuming Koreans have a technology friendly subway since doing this on the London Underground wouldnt really work since you dont get a signal, nor is there wifi or anything.

Yes, there is signal on the subways in Korea.

I like how they respect their competition, unlike in the software world where everybody is throwing rotten eggs at everybody.

I think you might be blindly giving them credit that isn't due. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2857088

tl;dr: the ad won them $400k in a competition, though it was never aired, and the setup existed for only 2 1/2 hours. Despite that:

>The Cannes Lions festival, called the Olympics of advertising, strictly limits submissions to advertisements that have actually been run in the media.

I don't quite think that's respecting their competition.

I wonder if there is a comparison between this form of online shopping vs. traditional online shopping via Freshdirect. Perhaps, the visual experience makes it more appealing and gives it the feel of real shopping as opposed to using a text search or link clicking.

While I've never used Freshdirect, I can't imagine it's quite as fast and easy to browse products there as it is to just visually scan across a huge wall of products. That's the advantage for the consumer.

The advantages are bigger for the seller. You don't have to rely on people remembering "Oh yes, I need to do some shopping" and going to your website. Instead they'll be walking through the subway station, remember "Oh yes, I need kim chee" and buy some. It's as good as having a store in the subway station, except that the store takes up no room and costs way less.

I can really see this store-on-a-wall thing taking off, and not just in Korea. If you can be the middleman who standardizes the protocol which lets anyone buy anything and get it delivered to their home, just by scanning a QR code, you'll make a lot of money.

"You don't have to rely on people remembering 'Oh yes, I need to do some shopping' and going to your website."

In that sense, the wall scanning is a bit of a gimmick; the critical thing is to remember you want/need to buy something.

FreshDirect, for example, does have an iphone app, but without the visual reminder, you may forget to order.

"If you can be the middleman who standardizes the protocol which lets anyone buy anything and get it delivered to their home, just by scanning a QR code, you'll make a lot of money."

That's an interesting idea: tie a QR reader app to someone's credit card or banks account on one end, and to an automated shopping cart on the other (assuming the QR links back to a specific product, of course).

In that sense, the wall scanning is a bit of a gimmick; the critical thing is to remember you want/need to buy something.

This is the big thing. I work for an online grocery shopping startup, and when speaking to lapsed customers the biggest answer we get as to why they've stopped shopping with us is that they forgot we exist and went to the supermarket instead. Breaking people's habits is a hugely difficult thing, but vital in a sector where most people's first thought is to go to drop into Tesco on the way home from work.

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