Amazon.co.uk takes on Tesco Amazon's UK tentacle is upping its range of goods for sale to include thousands of grocery and food items and lashings of lovely booze. The site, famous for books and DVDs, already had a wide range of products including gadgets, computers, clothes and car stuff. There will be 22,000 items from brands including Kraft, Nestle, …
Cybercandy?
www.cybercandy.co.uk or their bricks & mortar place near Covent Garden if you're in reach of London.
They have all sorts of stuff from around the world (including Japanese Kit-kats). They have all sorts of stuff going in and out of stock all of the time, so it's worth e-mailing them if you're after something specific that isn't shown on the website.
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...and the initial selection of Beers Of The World isn't bad - a reasonably decent range Belgian tipples on there, at least one decent American beer, and always nice to see Brewdog's offerings available as well.
We'll see how it works out in practice, though - I've used dedicated specialist retailers in the past and they've been very reasonable in pricing and delivery options, so it's one area where Amazon would face a bit of a struggle to win converts.
From a quick glance US-wise, Anchor Steam is OK, but (believe it or not you CAMRA snobs!) there are much better beers than that in the US - you just need to see beyond the Bud/Molson/Coors rubbish (all are like making love in a canoe...)
Either way, it's still cheaper at the local supermarket, and there are specialist retailers who already do much wider selections. (Beer-ritz, Beers of Europe, etc)
Just checked out a bottle of Bombay sapphire. 70cl is ~£25 plus over a fiver delivery. The Sainsbury's up the road from me has the 1 Litre bottle cheaper than that and no delivery fee (although I have to drive of course).
Admittedly only one product, and its still in Beta etc etc. But the beer prices didn't seem that good either.
Sorry Amazon - got to try harder than that. I can't see the Tesco-nator ceding ground that easily!
I was amused at the maths, the site is just taking the volume of the bottle and calculating £/l off of that... regardless of how many bottles. Elementary FAIL, to either not have 'quantity' unit value in the Db, or to not use it to calculate the price.
So that 27.03/l is actually about £9/l... still expensive tho!
nK
It seems that anything you buy through Amazon nowdays isn't actually from Amazon.
They seem have basically turned themselves into a shopping mall for other companies. So each item you buy could well have its over P&P. Presumably this is an attempt to muscle in on eBay, but do you really want to end up looking like that??
I recently bought (on account of getting a gift voucher) 3 more traditional items from Amazon. To be fair the prices displayed are competative. That said when you take into account the Postage and Packing charges of about £7, one item in particular had £4.99 P&P, this by no means the case.
The item with the additional £4.99 worked out about £3 more expensive then Asda or Tesco.
I'll believe that when amazon's goods also have a free next day "collect from a nearby store" option -- though they should do the job properly, with the collection point not requiring long queues and open until at least midnight a couple of days per week.
Delivery to home isn't a sensible option on goods that won't go through the letterbox, except possibly if you can choose a guaranteed half hour time slot for the delivery.
"offers only a disappointing nine lagers..."
disappointing!? Not in the slightest. Anyone wanting to drink that piss in the first place is puzzling enough, anyone going to the length of ordering it from Amazon is ludicrous. The limited and vastly overpriced range of ales is disappointing!
Mine's a pint of Pedigree!
While the standard variety has been on the shelves of my local supermarket for a wile, I have been looking for the Franks and Lime for ages, order going in. This stuff is great and justifies a visit to the USA by itself.
For the beer and wine i will stiil shop at lidl.
BTW Googled a couple of weeks ago and could not find a suppplier.
This grocery section of Amazon UK is horrendously uncompetitive in its pricing - far worse than even the most expensive supermarkets (yes, including M&S). A lot of this is down to using Marketplace resellers to stock the goods and those resellers are often sourcing the items from outside the UK (look at the beverages non-alcoholic, crisps or chocolate - most of them are brands or flavours that have never launched in the UK!).
Also note that the resellers will often charge you postage on top of your purchase too, making the prices even more cringeful. This is a disastrous launch by Amazon UK - selling groceries at import Web site prices is ludicrous when there's plenty of UK supermarkets online that *destroy* Amazon UK's grocery pricing.
I suspect this new grocey section will either have to be seriously revamped with competitive pricing from *UK*-sourced groceries or simply quietly shoved under the carpet and discontinued a few months down the line. Epic fail on all fronts!
Having looked beyond just the beer section, it seems that Tesco etc don't have much to worry about - it just looks like it's mainly Marketplace sellers, and not much actually from Amazon. For example:
1Kg Apples: £1.69 + £7.50 P&P
440g Beef stir fry strips: £6 + £5 P&P
4x Aberdeen Angus burgers: £5.40 + £4.13 P&P
and my fave so far:
1 orange pepper: 69p + £7.50 P&P
Everything I've found so far that IS supplied by Amazon seems to be out of stock, so either they sold out within hours of going live, or the warehouse lads haven't made it back from Costco yet...
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