Asda COO Judith McKenna has highlighted mobile shopping as a key channel for Asda ahead of the supermarket’s roll out of an Android version of its smartphone app.

Speaking at a Walmart conference for investors last week, McKenna spoke about the “incredible importance” of mobile shopping to Asda.

Asda was seeing “strong traffic” through its iPhone app and its mobile customers tended to order more often than desktop users, she said.

Its acquisition of 147 Netto stores in 2011 had been as much to facilitate internet orders as to build on its physical sales floor space, she added, pointing out that the stores enabled Asda to offer convenient click and collect services in local communities as well as larger areas.

“It is really important for us, in terms of the supermarket division, that we’ve been able to put Asda into locations and communities we wouldn’t have been able to get a larger footprint store into,” said McKenna. “About 35% to 40% of our online customers want to collect from stores. So having more stores in local communities helps drive our ecommerce as well as our physical business.”

McKenna also told investors that Asda had seen “fantastic growth” from ecommerce in three areas online groceries, general merchandise and George.com. All three divisions were going from “strength to strength”, she said.

Asda rolled out is first mobile transactional app, which it developed with Walmart’s global ecommerce team, last summer. It now receives more than 10,000 grocery orders placed on mobiles each week. Its online delivery service now covers 97% of UK postcodes.

The Android app, which joins an iPhone version rolled out in November, was launched this week. Asda also announced plans to introduce contactless payment from July.

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