Tesco now lets you automate your shopping with IFTTT
The best recipe? Push for beer.
Now we're at the point where shopping for groceries no longer requires you to trudge down to the local supermarket, retailers are constantly working on new ways to make filling our baskets a little bit easier. For its latest trial, Tesco -- still the UK's largest supermarket despite mega financial setbacks -- has launched a new platform that lets you automate some of your shopping. It's teamed up with task-managing service IFTTT to roll out a bunch of new "recipes" that can automatically add items to your basket when prices drop or even when the weather is unexpectedly favourable.
On its blog, the Tesco Labs team (the R&D people behind the new channel) explain that once you've connected your Tesco account to IFTTT, you can set it to monitor when the price of a product changes or drops below a preset price and add it to your basket for later checkout. Tesco's own recipes are useful but some enterprising users have already had a little fun and added their own. Notable inclusions are the "Push for beer" recipe or getting Alexa (the Amazon Echo voice assistant) to put milk in your basket with a spoken command.
Although IFTTT (which is short for If This Then That) is considered pretty nerdy, its iOS and Android apps make setting up recipes pretty simple. Maybe not as simple as Amazon's Dash buttons, but easy enough that you could save yourself some hassle when it comes to remembering exactly what you need on your weekly shop.
