Star order: Morrisons.com

Name: Simon Thompson

Job title: Managing director online food, Morrisons

This is only the second time Morrisons has featured in The Online Grocer 33 - and you were bottom of the pile last time. Yes. This is a great result, especially when you consider we have only been going for 15 or 16 weeks. We have had a really good start - we said we would be available to 13 million households by the end of the year and are about halfway towards that target now.

You started deliveries in Manchester ahead of schedule this week. How come? We have been able to leverage our existing infrastructure and are using our current spoke in Leeds. We’ve been able to do this because our rollout in Yorkshire has been so successful we had spare capacity. We can deliver to around 800,000 homes in the area so it is not the full North West rollout yet but where we can roll out we will.

So how is online doing in terms of meeting your targets? Very well so far. We are still under our 1% target for substitutions. We offer one-hour delivery slots and 96% of our deliveries are within that chosen slot. We also have a doorstep experience rating for our drivers based on feedback from shoppers. With six being the highest rating, 90% are currently being awarded five or six stars.

Can you give details on delivery numbers and sales? I can’t break that out at the moment, but we set a target of £500m of extra sales between online and convenience and progress is very good. We are winning a lot of customers from other retailers. When I go out on the vans myself I always offer to recycle customers’ plastic bags. It’s something we do but I also want to find out where they shop. It’s fair to say the majority of bags are from rivals. We have only been in London for a month and on the shift I have done in the vans today 40% were new customers and 60% were repeat orders, some even on their third already.

How has the I’m Cheaper campaign affected online? We are growing at such a fast rate that it is hard to tell exactly what effect certain things have had. However on the day we launched the campaign, traffic to the online grocery site doubled.

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