Virtual underground shopping

In brief

Seoul’s citizens may have tomorrow’s tech gadgets, but are pinched for time. Being the hardest working nation in the world – with 30% more labour time than the global average* – leisure is rare. Therefore grocery shopping is rather a burden than a pleasure. With many people living in the megacity’s suburbs and commuting to work for hours a lot of valuable time is spent in trains and train stations every day. Tesco’s Korean subsidiary Home plus sets out to make a virtue out of a necessity by putting up virtual grocery shelves in underground stations.

All images: © Home plus / Tesco

Large posters on the platforms mock the aisles of a supermarket and shelves hold the same products as they used to. But instead of physical products to grab there are 2-dimensional avatars and QR codes to snap. Whilst waiting for the next railway busy Seoulers can use a dedicated smartphone app to scan the codes and add the related products to their digital shopping basket. After the virtual check-out the goods are catered to the buyers’ homes on the very same day.

The virtual shelves bridge the gap between retail store, online shop and home delivery. While the products remain intangible just as in a web-based shopping application their real-size reproductions in familiar presentation style come as close as possible to a retail shopping experience. This might ease the buying process and remarkably considers the disposable time as well as spacial context within people’s daily routes.

Even though the poster shelves might be great for routine purchases they seam less appropriate for discovering new products. In any case Home plus proves to be a brand understanding their customers’ needs by creating a condensed and unpretentious brand and shopping experience that saves people valuable minutes of their rare spare time.

Although it was a temporary campaign the success for Home plus’ home delivery service which increased by 130 % in online sales almost guarantees a follow-up. And if not by Home plus itself some competitor will probably carry out more tests since this video documentation went around the business and ad world and made customers from all over the globe already ‘like’ its service design.

* – According to the OECD’s Better Life Index “people in Korea work 2256 hours a year”, which is the “highest rate in the OECD and much higher than the OECD average of 1739 hours”. [Source: OECD]

Overview

+ considering people’s day-to-day needs & daily routines
+ making the most of waiting – turning it into a productive moment
+ augmenting an app shopping experience
! rather works for repeated buying than discovery of new products
! condensed shopping experience compared to real supermarket