Countdown is building the equivalent of a virtual retail mall as it expands its online shopping and click and collect services.

The supermarket chain has been offering online shopping to customers for two decades although this service has not taken off notably.

Growth is visible in the click and collect option where people place their orders online and pick their groceries up later at a Countdown store.

National online manager for Countdown, Tony Petrie, says by mid-2016 online grocery shopping will have grown to be the equivalent of five supermarkets if forecasts are achieved.

Click and collect, which costs $5 more for a customer, is growing at 15 per cent a year, Petrie says.

Deliveries cost $8.75 for baskets of goods costing more than $250, $11.75 for baskets of goods costing $200 to $249, $13.75 for goods costing $100 to $199, and $15.75 for smaller shops.

The plan, according to Petrie, is for Countdown to partner with other businesses like clothing retailer EziBuy to create what amounts to an online shopping mall.

Each week Countdown fills approximately 20,000 online orders from its 80,000 customers who regularly order online. The foot count of customers who pass through Countdown’s stores each week number 2.7 million.

Many of its online shoppers do their shops infrequently, buying bulky dry goods that way and  popping into stores to buy fresh goods or do top-up shops.

With an average spend of $206 per shop, the business is bringing in over $4 million a week.

Countdown currently has the capacity to deliver to 99 per cent of the population of these isles, including to the Chatham Islands. It can get goods to wherever a courier can go, according to Petrie, with half of its stores offering click and collect.

Source: Fairfax journalist Rob Stock.