Grocery Shopping

[Guest AndyCr15]

I was stood in my kitchen yesterday, using Tesco's online website, searching what I needed and adding it to the shopping list. It was a relatively simple task, but could have been easier.

It gave me a few questions -

1) Do any online grocers have apps yet? (I know Ocado have one for the iPhone)

2) How hard would it be to write an app that worked through the online website?

3) How hard would it be to make an app that used the barcode scanner as an input device? I already e-mailed Tesco asking how easy would it be to include barcode search into their search results. In theory then, you scan a product your about to throw out and it could add it to your shopping list.

I'm currently e-mailing all online grocers suggesting they could win some customers by being the first to produce an Android app, the new up and coming mobile platform etc...

Just some thoughts... Has anyone else thought similar? Does anyone have any answers?

[Guest ducey]

It might be a good idea to have a chat with http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk who offer a good comparison of shopping with the many grocery stores, they might be interested in an app?

[Guest Nyami]

Tesco R&D do have an iPhone app that used their API, I've not used it as you need v3.1.2 on the iphone and I don’t. I haven’t full investigated the API and created anything yet but it does look like you can build up a shopping and everything appears to be in place to build a fully functional app using the API and there are already a few things out there. One of the really cool bits of info from the API is the stock location, you tell it your store and it tells the isle and shelf, the API also has nutritional information so there is a real possibility to create a really function app. As for the barcode scanner bit this is possible to get the code using the camera and the allows searching on barcode.

Here are a few links which might be of interest.

http://techfortesco.blogspot.com/

http://www.techfortesco.com/forum

Nyami