Justine and I frequently do our grocery shopping on weekends, since we find it difficult to do it during the week. This past weekend, we were too busy to even contemplate going shopping, which left us with a choice: Buy food or end up having take away all week.

Sure, the take away option sounds good, but it’s expensive and the food isn’t usually as good. On Sunday, we decided that we would try one of the online shopping services.

Coles Online is the better known of the online grocery stores — at least to me; the service launched a few years ago now — eight? nine? — though the availability was very limited. Safeway (Woolworths) also has a service: HomeShop, which appears to have launched four years ago.

Since we shop at Coles — our closest supermarket is Coles; the local Safeways are dirty and have rude staff — we decided to give Coles Online a shot. The first thing I noticed is that the design of the site does not appear to have changed since the first time I checked it out, which just so happened to be a few weeks after it launched. The second thing I noticed is that the site is slow. Molasses slow.

HomeShop, on the other hand, is a far nicer-looking site, loads faster and just seems to be a more user-friendly and polished experience.

Using our regular shopping list (we just jot it down on paper located in the kitchen) we added all the items to our virtual trolley. It took quite a while navigating the site, as finding items only by their name is not as easy as recognising the packet.

Eventually, we had our shopping list, and proceeded to checkout. HomeShop charges (for us, at least) between $7.50 and $10.00 for delivery, depending on the times and delivery window. Conveniently, though, they deliver during the evening. We chose a 5-8pm window, though a 6-9pm one was also available. This delivery window was $7.50, but as we were first-time customers, the fee was waived (which we didn’t know until the final total was presented).

All that was left was to wait. So wait we did.

At 7:50pm the delivery truck arrived — and I expect this would be the norm — with our bags of groceries. Everything we’d ordered was included, as well as a sample of Nivea face wash. Why? No idea. The ice cream was a tad melty, like it’d been left in the car for an hour or two, but everything else was fine. We included fresh fruit and vegetables in our order and they all looked fine; some looked better than in-store produce, likely because it came directly from a warehouse.

A fuel discount voucher was also included — with eight cents off, which is twice our normal discount.

We didn’t get any meat, as they don’t offer the brand of chicken we buy and I like to choose my cuts of beef. The delivery may be a bit more expensive, but we refrained from impulse purchases. All in all I can see us using HomeShop again; since it saves everything you buy in a list, successive shops will be significantly faster.