The three main supermarkets in the UK, Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and ASDA, all provide internet users with the means to order groceries online and have them delivered home.

Each online store is complete with an extensive database on all products available online and their prices. The question is, why don’t they provide web service APIs?

The beauty of the Amazon web services is that Amazon becomes a platform as much as they are an online superstore. Any website that has anything to do with books can become an affiliate by using the Amazon database to provide details on books and referring users to Amazon.com to get a percentage of any products sold.

The possibilities for supermarkets with regards to web services are enormous. Think of all the sites that focus on recipes, diets or health programs. Each one of these could become an affiliate so that with the press of a button, all the ingredients for next weekend’s dinner party or next week’s diet are transferred automatically into an online shopping chart and delivered to a customer’s door.

Providing an online store is not enough to change the way people shop. Giving third parties access to supermarket databases so that they can come up with ways to save people time and trouble is how it should be done. The first supermarket that realises this has the potential to become an industry leader within one or two years of implementing the idea.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 8:46 am and is filed under Business, Technology, The Web as a platform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.