Grocery Shopping Goes Virtual! Home Plus Virtual Store

In Korea, online shopping is quite popular and many people prefer to buy daily necessities online instead of visiting crowded megamarkets in person. There is one category, however, where this doesn’t hold true: FOOD.

HomePlus, a retail chain jointly owned by Samsung and Tesco in Britain, came up with a brilliant idea to make it more convenient for people to buy food and other supermarket goods. The company created virtual stores in highly trafficked subway stations.

Large photos of product-filled shelves fill the subway station. Under each product is the price and a QR code you can scan with your smartphone, using a special HomePlus app avialble for both iOS and Android.

I’d never seen one of these stations for myself until I went to Seolleung Station in southern Seoul a few days ago.

We were in desperate need of detergent at home and my favorite brand was on sale in the virtual store.

Boxes of detergent are quite heavy and I didn’t really want to have to carry it from the store to home, so ordering with my phone and having the detergent delivered seemed like an especially convenient solution.

Home Plus delivers every two hours so you can choose the most convenient time to receive the products. True to the promise I received the detergent at the time I selected.

There’s one other reason I wanted to shop with HomePlus. They lead Korea’s supermarkets in donations to charity. When customers buy certain products, 1% of the revenue goes to a fund that supports children with cancer.

Check out the below video to see exactly how to use the Home Plus Virtual Store!