Tesco Direct

» see tesco.com/direct as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In the autumn of 2006 Britain's biggest grocer printed a catalog. Tesco Direct opened that September as a website and an 8,000-item book of the things that did not fit in a grocery aisle, furniture and electricals first, orderable online or from a desk in the supermarket. The Guardian had the launch down for 6 September; tesco.com was still showing "Tesco Direct - coming soon" on the 12th and had the full menu by the 20th. The model was Argos, down to the desks, and Retail Week reported that Argos staff came to look at the first Tesco catalog shop on its opening day.

It sold. Retail Week put Direct's sales above £180 million in 2007 and reported eighty more order desks going into stores through 2008. In April 2012 the site quietly opened to third-party sellers, big high street names that did not compete with Tesco's own ranges at first, and the trade press noted the word marketplace with some suspicion. Behind it all was Fenny Lock in Milton Keynes, a 650,000 square foot warehouse that Tesco had called its flagship when it opened.

The Tesco name reached Turkey, as it happens. The company bought the Kipa chain in the Aegean in 2003 and ran it as Tesco Kipa until Migros took it over in 2017, so the red lettering was on hypermarkets around İzmir for most of Direct's life. The catalog did not travel. Direct was a British object, ordered at a desk beside the checkouts in Welwyn Garden City or Milton Keynes, and there was nothing to order from Ankara.

On 22 May 2018 Tesco said there was "no route to profitability for this small, loss-making part of the business" and gave the date: trading would stop on 9 July. Approximately 500 colleagues were put at risk, most of them at Fenny Lock, which closed with the site. The last full capture of tesco.com/direct is from 9 July. By the 11th the address redirected to the grocery homepage, where a Tesco Direct link still sat in the menu, pointing at a page that no longer sold anything.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the desk beside the checkouts ~

The desk was the part of Tesco Direct that did not exist on the internet. Homeplus, the non-food store format Tesco tried from 2005, was built around it, and the Cribbs Causeway store that Retail Week visited in July 2008 had Direct kiosks installed and nine more Homeplus stores in the plan. An order placed at the desk was picked at Fenny Lock like any other. The idea was that a grocer people already visited every week could sell them a sofa on the way past the tills, and for a few years the numbers said it could.

~ what the notice named ~

"High costs for fulfilment and online marketing" was the diagnosis in Tesco's own words. Direct had run as a separate site from the grocery basket for twelve years, and Charles Wilson, then chief executive for the UK, framed the closure as a merger: "We want to offer our customers the ability to buy groceries and non-food products in one place." The Milton Keynes Citizen called it the supermarket's attempt to take on Amazon and reported that Fenny Lock staff were briefed on the afternoon of the announcement. Toys and homeware had already started moving onto tesco.com before the notice went out.

~ eighteen sellers ~

In June 2024 tesco.com opened a marketplace again, promising "100s of trusted brand partners". Eighteen third-party sellers were live on 5 June, listing about 10,000 products between them against more than a thousand on B&Q's marketplace, by the count of Which? The old address answers Access Denied now. The 2012 version had at least had a warehouse behind it.

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