iceland.co.uk

When I lived in the Scottish Borders, my nearest supermarkets were five miles away. The thought of dragging my monthly shop on and off a bus was not very appealing and a taxi would have been too expensive. I looked around on the net to see what was on offer and decided to give Iceland a try.

First of all it’s best to have a little look around the store before you register, you can do this by clicking on the button that says Take a Look. I’m telling you this because, here you can type in your postcode to see if they will deliver in your area before you get too excited and rush round the site merrily filling your shopping basket. They don’t deliver everywhere yet. Now that I’ve moved up to the Highlands I can’t get my groceries delivered from anywhere, oh well, one day perhaps. Anyway the point I’m getting at is you won’t have wasted any time if they don’t cover your area.

Once you’ve established that you can get a delivery, you have to register with them to start off with so they can get your address and credit card details, then you can begin to shop.

On the left hand side of the screen you will see a list of categories such as pizza and bread, daily basics, pies puddings and sweets etc. (it's quite a long list) just choose a category and off you go.

Each category then has a sub-category, for instance if you choose the Dairy option the sub-categories will be, cheese, yoghurt, milk, cream, butter and margarine. Click on any of those and then you get on to the page where you can make your choice by brand preference and size, it sounds long winded but you soon get into it honestly. You can look at a picture of anything you see listed and you can also check the contents of your shopping basket, which is sitting at the bottom of your screen. As you go along it shows the last five items you've picked.

You will also see different colour coded symbols on a lot of items for instance "b" is buy one get one free, "S" is a special offer,"V" is a product suitable for vegetarians etc. If you click on these you will be taken to another page to show you what it means, which does make things a bit long winded if you do this for everything but it's very useful just the same. In any case you will soon learn what each of the symbols mean.

You can change your mind about the things you order as you go along, just scroll down your basket and select delete on the items you don't want.

Once you've checked your basket you select "place my order" and you will be taken to the checkout where they check your details and credit card number and you can pick a delivery time, (they ask you if there's anything they should be aware of such as a big scary dog) then just sit back and wait for it to arrive.

It does take a long time to shop at first, but you do have the option to save that basket so that next time round you can just modify it a bit to suit your needs and that should save you a lot of time in the future. At least you haven't had to battle through the aisles yourself which takes time even on a quiet day, not to mention getting to the shop, finding a parking space and everything else that goes with the joys of supermarket shopping.

Our first 'shop' had about £5 worth of goods missing so I e-mailed them as soon as I'd double-checked it. They replied at once with an apology and a promise to send out the missing items that day. When the goods arrived I also received a bottle of wine as an apology for my inconvenience. I was impressed - yes they had made a mistake but they made an effort to rectify it straight away. That doesn't happen as often as it should does it? So I decided to carry on shopping with them. The next couple of orders also had mistakes, but they were always put right at once and soon all my orders were as they should be.

Iceland are adding to the lines available all the time (at first you couldn't get fresh bread or milk, fresh fruit and veg and quite a lot of other stuff). There’s also a lot of buy one, get one deals on all the time. I’ve had some excellent bargains.

All in all I think Iceland have a lot to offer and if you consider the fact that orders worth £40 or more are free of delivery charges, you certainly get a good deal compared to Tesco who charge £5. I just wish I could still shop with them.Happy Shopping!