KING SOOPERS SHOPPING SITE SUPPORTS LOYALTY CUSTOMERS

Liza Casabona

DENVER -- In new online food-shopping sites, King Soopers here, as well as online grocery service Peapod, are trying to enhance the online experience for loyalty card shoppers.

Last month, King Soopers, a division of Kroger, launched HomeShop, an online shopping and home-delivery service for customers in the Boulder, Colo., area. According to Dave Hopson, manager of HomeShop, when King Soopers' loyalty card holders enter their loyalty card number on the site, they are provided with a "first item list" of frequently purchased products based on shopping history.

Moreover, the site, developed by AccuCode here, allows consumers to shop the product selection and inventory of their local store, which picks the order. Hopson said the site gives shoppers the same product choices they would have if they visited the store in person. Online purchases are integrated into the point-of-sale system at the store.

Meanwhile, Peapod, Skokie, Ill., and Stop & Shop, Quincy, Mass. -- both subsidiaries of Ahold -- last week expanded Peapod's online grocery service to the Hartford, Conn., metropolitan area. Available to residents of more than 100 Hartford-area ZIP codes at stopandshop.com, the service allows cardholders to shop online from a list of items they have bought at their local Stop & Shop by entering their card number. Peapod partners with Stop & Shop in other New England markets, including New York.

Neither King Soopers' application nor Peapod's apply loyalty discounts.

King Soopers has offered online grocery shopping in the Front Range section of Colorado and in the Denver market for four years. The new HomeShop application in Boulder is expected to be installed in those markets by this fall. According to Hopson, HomeShop was largely constructed from elements of the legacy site. In addition, the chain surveyed pilot users and the general public about features they would like to see.

"This new technology has allowed us to take our years of experience and put it into this new application, which supports processing that we feel will allow us to fill orders with greater efficiency and accuracy than we've done in the past," said Hopson.

The AccuCode system encompasses three applications: an e-commerce store front; order fulfillment; and a customer service intranet. The fulfillment system breaks orders into directed picking tickets, allocates the orders to pickers within the store, and provides the pickers with detailed instructions from the customer. Orders can request a special ripeness of a banana.

Bar-code technology is used to track and validate orders through delivery. Before leaving on his route, the driver logs into a mobile device that provides directions, detail of orders on the truck, credit card capturing capability, customer service access, and scanning to verify delivery. The customer service intranet enables store-level employees and call center personnel to help customers.