Airtasker partners with Coles on personalised grocery service

Airtasker has teamed up with Coles in a bid to help time-poor consumers tap into personalised grocery shopping and delivery services.

The 12-month ‘Airtasker Shop and Deliver’ service is based around the new Coles@Airtasker website, and allows consumers to specify delivery times, customise shopping lists and substitute missing items through real-time preferences. This is achieved via one-to-one communications between the shopper and Airtasker’s team.

Users post a task, specify their Coles grocery items, preferred delivery location and time and set a budget. Once they receive and select an offer from an Airtasker, that individual does the shopping for them.

The site is being supported by a team of Airtasker contractors who must earn a ‘Coles Badge’ to participate. The badge is based on completing a Coles branded shopping guide around picking and packing goods, as well as meeting criteria set by Airtasker HQ.

The trial commences this week across 64 Coles stores in the Sydney region.

“We know our customers enjoy the convenience of having their groceries delivered by Coles Online – this trial with Airtasker will make shopping even more convenient by allowing customers to deal directly with the person doing their shopping and bringing it to them,” Coles online general manager, Karen Donaldson, said.

Airtasker co-founder and CEO, Tim King, said the ambition was to help consumers to spend more time on other tasks.

“Grocery shopping is one of the fastest growing tasks on the Airtasker platform as Australians get smarter about how they use their time,” he said.

This is not the first time Airtasker has partnered up with a major retailer. Earlier this year, the company signed a deal with IKEA to help tackle take away the challenge for customers around furniture assembly.

Last July, the online marketplace for odd jobs also struck an alliance with The Good Guys around a new digital platform aimed at better connecting post-purchase customers with the consumer appliance retailer’s installer network. That deal allowed customers to track and coordinate services online, manage variations to their job, access certificates once a job was completed, and also rate their experience.

At the back end, the platform then provided job details to installers via an app, as well as helped to streamline payments and provide reporting dashboards. Those who undertook a job for a customer were also then required to upload photos and documentation for review.

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