Ocado Successfully Switches From Waitrose to M&S

Ocado Retail, the grocery delivery service, says it has successfully switched over from Waitrose to Marks and Spencer (M&S), two weeks after making the switch on September 1.

The vast majority of customers have chosen to stick with Ocado, with practically no sign of any loss of customers back to Waitrose or anywhere else, the company said.

The move had been at least a year in the making, from before there was any pandemic on the horizon. A shift from the upmarket grocery chain, to the equally upmarket M&S, was apparently not too difficult for the customer to bear — showing greater loyalty to Ocado than to its supermarket partner.

Ocado said that any movement away from the delivery company was extremely low and could potentially be a result of shoppers being on holiday.

In fact, the decline was much less that Ocado Retail had anticipated, which the company put down to “warmth and love” that customers have for the M&S brand.

Meanwhile, the company said in its third quarter results that average order size is beginning to normalize to about £141, down from the peaks of the pandemic, but still above pre-crisis levels.

However, it was also reported that Ocado had told suppliers that there had been an 11 per cent drop off in the number of customers using the site during the first week of the switchover.

Ocado is offering some 4400 products from the M&S range, or about 400 more than was previously offered from Waitrose. The company intends to increase that to 6,000 stock keeping units in due course.