You wait ages for a pound shop to start selling online and then three come along at once.

Poundworld has announced it will begin selling through Poundshop.com from tomorrow, with a range of more than 1,000 products available from launch. There is a minimum order of £10 and deliveries nationwide cost a flat fee of £3.65. Poundshop.com is a partnership with Steve Smith, who was, confusingly, the co-founder of Poundland.

Poundshop.com is joined by Hereforapound.com, which launched last week (and in fact sells a similar number of products). Hereforapound.com offers nationwide delivery with a standard charge of £3.50, although orders over £30 are free. Another new entrant is PoundPanda, which launched on Friday, and promises nationwide delivery priced at £3.95 on a range of 2,000 lines – including household, kitchenware and personal care.

(An earlier effort to sell pound products online, Poundshop.co.uk, launched in 2004 and closed in 2011.)

But is this what the world has been waiting for? Do people really want to buy pound-shop items online? Part of the appeal, I’ve always thought, was the ability to dive into your local pound shop and make impulse purchases. Can shoppers be bothered to do their top-up shop online?

The discounters are certainly hoping so: Poundland said recently it was “well advanced” in finalising plans for its own home delivery service, while 99p Stores is “testing the waters”.

There’s no doubting the range and quality of what you can now buy in the single-price retailers. So perhaps the question is less whether people will use such services (as Poundworld points out, its online service will extend its reach to areas its 200 UK stores do not serve), but whether the retailers can possibly make them financially viable.

“I’m surprised the rest of the single-price market has been so slow to embrace online as Poundshop will fill a big gap in the market,” Steve Smith said last month. But is it really a surprise? The cost and effort of setting up an online distribution network, promoting it and fulfilling orders is enormous. It has taken years for Morrisons to do it, and it needed the help of an established partner and a staggered rollout to do it. Even then, it didn’t exactly triumph in last week’s Grocer 33 Online. The cost and complexity will quickly mount for a retailer with such low margins as a single-price discounter.

So there’s a lot riding on Poundshop.com – the first botched order or whisper of complaint on social media and it will have a job on its hands wooing customers to try the service. You can’t help but wonder whether Poundworld wouldn’t be better off sticking to aggressive store expansion (it opened 46 new stores during the year to 31 March 2013, and there are still plenty of empty shops out there it might want to target).

But the discounters have proven to be canny operators, and given the bigger boys plenty of headaches. Who’s to say they can’t play them at the online game too? We will watch with interest.

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