Tesco's e-tail rollout has India as its innovation hub

Mumbai: Bangalore research centre at work to marry mobile technology to offerings in diverse apps

Imagine a scenario where you are browsing through a recipe are also able to buy all the ingredients for the dish at a tab of your figure.

This is what Tesco allows its buyers to do in the UK and elsewhere with help from its India technology centre. The application (app) for the iPad has been developed by the UK retailer’s India captive unit based out of Bangalore.

Tesco Hindustan Service Centre, is helping the world’s third largest and Britian’s leading retailer in going global with its e-commerce roll-out. After successfully running its e-commerce site in the UK, the retailer is now planning to take its online stores to other regions. The first successful roll out of its online grocery shopping services outside the UK happened in the Czech Republic.

The technology team from Tesco HSC based out of Bangalore is a part of Tesco’s online foray. The team has developed the online platform that supports 25 countries and allows shoppers to browse the site in multiple languages.

“The user response has been excellent. It is one of the five most visited retail websites and on average processes 500,000 orders a week across its online businesses. With the demographic of the buyer changing, we now need to fulfil the customer expectation and reach out to various touch points,” said Sandeep Dhar, CEO of Tesco HSC.

For Tesco, its online and mobile foray is crucial as it increases revenue via online services. According to the 2010-11 annual report, online sales grew 15 per cent. More, 12 per cent of customer traffic to the tesco.com site is coming via the mobile-based grocery app.

Last year, the Bangalore-based team produced an online application called Click & Collect, that allows customers to collect rather than wait for the delivery.

“We found customers wanted flexibility even when they shop online. Based on customer feedback, we launched our Click & Collect services. Customers can browse and select their items and place the order online. The order is put together and kept ready for collection by the customer at a defined store location; the customer can simply drive in and collect the shopping and be on their way,” explains Dhar.

While this might sound simple, the Bangalore-based team was responsible for every detail of the Click & Collect platform. Some key challenges include a single core code base to support multiple (25) countries, ability for the platform to serve more than one country from a single deployed instance, allow customers to browse the site in multiple languages, allow for the site to be hosted across multiple data centres, be flexible enough to support variations in business processes, and product data and legal/compliance requirements of each country.

“We have come up with a unique architect for the online platform. It works just like an application store. You can use the App store to download an application to enhance the iPhone usage. We have used a similar concept but on the server side and we call it ‘internal AppStore’. We have created an internal suite of applications, which can be part of the platform, depending on the country it is being rolled out in and the customer experience that Tesco’s local arm in that region wants to give customers,” said Dhar.

By bringing in a plug-and-play format to the server and application side, Dhar and his team do not need to reprogramme the applications each time, thus reducing the time of deployment.

Tesco HSC’s overall headcount is 6,300. Of this, a team of 500 employees work on the online solutions and mobile platform. About 75 per cent of Tesco’s IT core sits in Tesco HSC that includes- infrastructure management, application support and development of architecture. The HSC team support 14 operations in countries — the UK, Ireland, America, Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic and India.

Mobile is another big focus for the Bangalore team. They have also developed applications for both Apple’s AppStore and for Android. Its mobile shopping application has seen half a million downloads so far.

One application the team is working on is a voice-based search app.

“Instead of you typing the product’s name and searching for it on Tesco’s website, buyers will be able to just speak out the product and get the various options. For instance, one can just say milk and the application will list out the variety of milk brands to choose from. We are still working on the voice accuracy. We also intend to roll this cout in at least eight-nine languages,” said Dhar.