Aldi appears not to have given up entirely on online just yet, with its recruitment site currently listing 14 e-commerce roles, including a senior manager on £111k.
The discounter axed home delivery of general merchandise and wines & spirits earlier this year, a service it launched in 2015. It also scaled back on click & collect grocery shopping, withdrawing the service from 12 of the roughly 200 stores that had offered it since 2020.
Explaining the move last month, Aldi UK & Ireland CEO Giles Hurley told The Grocer: “We will listen to customers and serve them in the channels where they want to be and right now that’s bricks & mortar.”
Nevertheless, the supermarket is currently looking for an e-commerce business development manager, on up to £90k, needed so Aldi “can keep giving our customers new and exciting ways to shop”, according to the job listing.
The candidate will lead a team that will “need to generate detailed proposals for new business cases and ultimately pitch them to senior stakeholders and then implement them if approved”.
It is among five e-commerce roles for which candidates are invited to apply now. For the other nine, including the senior e-commerce manager position, applicants are invited to register their interest, with a full job description yet to be added to the listing.
The roles include an e-commerce senior analyst, on up to £76k, as well as an e-commerce team leader and an e-commerce business development analyst, both on up to £58k.
Aldi said its click & collect service remained an ongoing trial requiring an active team to deliver it. It said the advertised vacancies covered a mix of new and replacement roles.
Hurley told the The Grocer in September that “during the pandemic, it was very clear customers wanted to be served in a different channel”, but online’s share of the market had “reduced significantly” since.
NIQ’s UK head of retailer and business insight, Mike Watkins, said this week that the online grocery channel was “back into sustainable growth”, with sales up 7.3% over 12 weeks to 7 October.
Over the four weeks to 7 October, online’s grocery share returned to 11% for the first time since March, as it grew sales faster than physical stores – by 10.8% versus 8.1%. Shoppers choosing online claimed to be doing so to save money (51%) and time (48%), NIQ said.
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