According to stories in New Media Age Tesco has submitted a new application to Nokia for approval to join the Ovi Store and are going ahead with an Ovi m-commerce app ahead of an iPhone app.
The new application, called Tesco Grocery App, is the first transactional application they have released for mobile and will be released for Nokia S60 mobiles.
Angela Maurer, head of web and mobile development at Tesco.com, outlined the reasons for a launch on Ovi rather than iPhone, “We’re launching our first transactional mobile app on the Nokia Ovi Store. We cross-referenced our research with Nokia’s and found a lot of crossover between its core customers and ours.”
Nick Lansley, Tesco.com head of R&D, said: “Our core customers are busy mums who don’t have iPhones and we want to focus on them first.” However, they did state they have plans to roll out applications on other devices in the future.
Tesco.com has also formed a development team to bolster its mobile services and extend its strategy beyond the smartphone market before the end of the year.
The Tesco Grocery Application will work with their current Tesco.com choices and allows users to update their shopping basket on their mobile by browsing through the full Tesco store, and any changes made will be synced to the their normal Tesco.com account.
The app was developed for Tesco by specialist mobile development company, Ribot.
The Tesco Mobile application should be approved by Nokia in the next few days and should be appearing on the Ovi Store right after. The app will run on the following devices : 5800, N97, N97 mini, X6, 5230 and 5530.
Tesco aren’t the first high street store to go for M-commerce Marks & Spencer tapped into mobile commerce in May, allowing customers to browse and buy 24,000 products, including clothing, from their mobile, and the Ocado iPhone app already accounts for over 4.4% of their orders received.
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