Money saving tips for your online grocery shop
Ocado is Britain’s best known online supermarket, with over 400,000 orders a week, they’re a popular choice for online shopping and the main route to get M&S food delivered online.
But it can be perceived as expensive by some. So we lift the lid on Ocado when it comes to value and uncover the ways you can save money on your weekly shop.
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Sign up with a welcome offer
There are some really good sign up offers for Ocado. As an online supermarket, they have to convince supermarket shoppers that online is the way to shop so they offer plenty of enticing offers to encourage you to try them.
Their go to offer which you can find on their website is 25% off your first shop and 3 months of free deliveries. You’ll find a voucher code on their homepage.
Or you can go through a cashback site and save not just on your first orders but get extra back on top. And don’t forget, if you’re new to cashback sites you can get an extra bonus on top – right now worth up to £20 extra.
Check the offers section
Ocado has an abundance of offers and includes branded items, their own-label and Marks and Spencer products too.
You’ll find an offers tab at the top of the homepage where you’ll find half price items, multi-buys, meal deals as well as bundle offers to help you save money on your shopping.
At the time of writing, you can get 3 for £12 meat and fish, plus you’ll also find many of the same offers you’d find in Marks and Spencer including three ready meals for £9, the £8 stir-fry deal and the three deli items for £8.
When you check out, a page of flash sale items comes up where you’ll find a selection of items reduced in price. These can often be pretty decent and around 40% or 50% off – but do check similar items aren’t already cheaper.
Use the Ocado flash sale trick at checkout
There is a little hack to get more from those flash offers – you’re not limited to just the ones you see when you first complete the order.
If you amend your order on a different day and check out again, then you’ll often find a new selection of flash-price items to choose from.
I always tend to add things anyway, as there’s always something or other that I need to add to my basket, but you can do this even if you don’t want to make any changes.
Don’t worry, any previous flash sale items you put in your basket will still be there at that lower price. This is a great way to nab a few extra goodies at a bargain price.
Hope for an early delivery
The later you get your delivery, the cheaper it’ll be, potentially down to as little as 99p. The problem is this might mean you need to greet the driver past 10pm!
However, whenever our editor Andy has done this, he’s had a phone call asking if it was convenient to come by earlier. It’s still a late one – maybe around 9pm, but it saves a few quid each time.
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Take advantage of the Ocado price promise
Ocado reduced the price of over 1,700 products at the beginning of this year and in addition, they now price match over 10,000 products with Tesco, even matching their promotions including clubcard prices.
They do all the checking for you, so if your shop would have been cheaper at Tesco for any of the 10,000 everyday products they price match, they’ll give you a voucher to make up the difference.
Buy Ocado or M&S own-label
Ocado updated and increased the number of their own-label products a few years back and now have a competitively priced own-label range to rival any supermarket with many products price-matched with Tesco. You’ve also got M&S’s everyday range, which can also be competitive on price.
Buy a Smart Pass
If you’re a regular Ocado shopper, then it pays to have a Smart Pass to save on delivery charges. Ocado have calculated the average saving on delivery to be £113 per year for Smart Pass customers.
The Smart Pass will also save you at least 10% on select products and you’ll get free gifts and samples too.
The price varies depending on whether you pay once a year, every six months or monthly. Here’s the current cost in the table below. When you consider a single delivery charge costs from 99p to £6.99 depending on availability, the Smart Pass can really save you money, especially on the annual plan.
Look for special introductory offers which might get you a few months free.
| Pay monthly | Pay six monthly | Pay annually | |
| Anytime Smart Pass | £8.99 | £49.99 | £89.99 |
| Midweek Smart Pass (Tues to Thursday) | £3.99 | £22.49 | £39.99 |
Check your emails for bounce back offers
If you haven’t shopped at Ocado for a while, they are well known for sending you incentive emails to try and get you to give them another go.
For example, just last month, I had an email with an enticing offer of 30% off a £70 shop (maximum reward £27). Meanwhile, Andy recently got sent four vouchers totalling £65 to use over four shops.
That is quite a saving and I’ve not come across another online supermarket offering that high a discount.
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Check your coupons page
Under the offers tab you’ll find a link to your coupons page to save some further money. I’ve not had anything in my coupon page yet to comment on but it’s worth checking before you checkout to see if you have any.
Don’t forget to return your carrier bags
Another way to get money off your shop is to recycle your carrier bags. For each Ocado carrier bag you hand back to the driver for recycling, you’ll get 10p off your bill.
Is Ocado expensive?
To really get an idea of the price difference between Ocado and the mainstream supermarkets, I compared a random breakfast basket shop to Asda. The table below shows the results.
| Ocado | Asda | |
| Warburtons wholemeal loaf (800g) | £1.35 | £1.35 |
| 4 pints semi skimmed milk | £1.45 | £1.45 |
| Weetabix 24 pack | £3.50 | £3.50 |
| Own-label butter (250g) | £1.69 | £1.69 |
| Bananas | 85p for 5 (17p each) | 99p for 6 (16.5p each) |
I was surprised to see that the prices were almost identical, so Ocado isn’t necessarily as expensive as it is often perceived to be.
That said, the Which? basket and big shop monthly supermarket price comparisons usually put Ocado around 7th in the list, so it clearly isn’t the cheapest, but this could in part be due to a lack of a value range of products.
But with its Tesco price matched products, multiple offers and meal deals, savings on delivery charges with Smart Pass, and don’t forget the petrol money you save, I’d say it’s not that far off the main four supermarkets when it comes to price.
And don’t discount the time you’d save, since their website is very user friendly and is a great prompt for your regular products as well as having an easy shopping list feature to speed things up.
All it needs now is a loyalty card for extra discount and I’d be a regular Ocado shopper!
I’m now on my second 2 month free anytime delivery deal from Ocado in a year.. But even if not free then I choose a Wednesday as this is the cheapest home delivery day, just a pound or two.. I do think overall they are more expensive than high street supermarkets but what I really appreciate is the outstanding delivery service. It is very rare for ordered items to be missing or substituted and the online receipt categorises all the items with the use by dates clearly shown too.