MySupermarket claims it helps you save money with your supermarket shopping, but do you actually make saving? Read our review to find out.
MySupermarket is a comparison web site that allows you to compare the prices of your weekly shopping between four supermarkets – Tesco, Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Asda.
You can compare the prices of individual items, or the cost of your complete supermarket shop. You can even shop at all four supermarkets at the same time, although this would mean four delivery charges.
You can easily find the top offers from each of the supermarkets and chooses from individual categories or “aisles” in much the same way as if your were shopping in an actual supermarket.
For example, there are fruit and vegetable, dairy, packets and cereals and household and pets aisles for all of the supermarkets. Clicking on an aisle brings up the best offers for that category, followed by well presented information about each product, often accompanied with a good image of that item.
Testing the price comparisons
To test the direct price comparison, we chose a box of Alpen fruit and nut with chocolate bars as it is likely that they would be sold by every one of the four supermarkets.
The page showed that this product costs £1.00 in Asda, £1.99 in Waitrose but are the most expensive in Sainsburys and Morrisions at £2.00!
Searching for the nice Hovis seed sensations bread also produced good savings.
Sainsbury’s and Morrisions are expensive as they are selling it for £1.45, whereas Tescos are cheapest at £1.25.
You can easily search for a bargain yourself to see if mySupermarket can save you money.
You also get some very useful information. Click on any item and you get a larger image, nutrient information including the FSA traffic light labelling (which summarises the fat, salt and sugar contents amongst other nutritional factors) and of course price and product size.
The benefits of registering with mySupermarket
It is quick and easy to compare prices individual prices of items without registering on mySupermarket, however there are considerable benefits for registering free with their service.
You can create a weekly shopping list and the web site will calculate the cheapest total price for your shop at that point in time, comparing the quality of items between supermarkets as closely as possible.
Knowing that your shop will cost less at one of the supermarkets you can then place your order directly with that shop through the MySupermarket web site. This is an important benefit as it means that you don’t then have to reenter your shopping list into the online supermarket web site that you want to order from.
Once you have created your standard shopping list, the web site will also give you suggestions based on your choices.
Saving money with offline weekly shopping
A feature that we particularly likes is that once you have created your shopping list and found the cheapest supermarket to buy that list from, you can then print out that list to take to your local store.
This is ideal if you don’t really trust online supermarkets, but want to benefit from the cost savings found by mySupermarket.
Does mySupermarket save you money?
The answer to this depends on how you shop. If you are on the look out for special offers then mySupermarket makes it very easy to find these.
For example, it will show you that one supermarket is currently offering your bread rolls with a great discount. It makes sense to buy a few packs at this price and stock up with them.
The site is therefore an excellent way of finding special offers which will save you money, but not if that necessitates an additional delivery charge.
It also depends on if you are willing to switch from supermarket to supermarket to get the best saving.
The site is very efficient at showing you the total cost of your shop at each of the four supermarkets, but can struggle to find direct comparisons between some products.
For example, your shop this week may be cheaper at one of the online supermarkets that you generally don’t use. You know from experience that their apples are not as good, and neither is their bread.
Do you switch to the cheaper supermarket for this weeks shop and accept the less appetising apples or not? That is up to you.
In general, though, the users we spoke to said that they do save money week in week out with MySupermarket, and you can see this is some of the comments below.
In our next article we show how mySupermarket helps you make other savings.
Article updated on 19 September 2016
As there is still interest in this article, and mySupermarket are still going strong, we have updated this article with the latest product prices and comparison deals.
I was looking for mySupermarket in Google and this post came up pretty high although it is ancient so i though i should reply. I have been using mySupermarket for a very long time now. About 2 years.
Using the site i was able to save over 800 pounds.
The supermarkets are really smart. They work very hard so that i think i am saving while in fact they are bleeding me dry. With mySupermarket i get to stay ahead of the game and call their bluff.
There is always a right place to buy the things i need. Doing the research on my own would have take me hours. These guys help me make the right choices. I just wish i could use them for household items and electronics.
i found that shopping on line is wonderful. it takes about 1 hour a week and you can start putting
things into your basket all during the week as and when you think about something you need….rarely anything is left off the list like this. the delivery cost is nothing compared to having to pay for parking and the hassle of driving to the shop and dealing with the queues, rain in the
winter and all those with nasty colds which get passed on.
i would highly recommend you get started!
Thanks for your comment, Wes.
I agree that just making a £5 saving is not worth switching supermarkets for, but if you look at the home page of MySupermarket you can see the savings that customers are currently making in real time.
A lot seem to be saving £15 or more, which over a month adds up to £60, which is worth switching for as long as the quality is comparable.
When I first heard of mysupermarket I was quite sceptical and still am to be honest – I do believe most people have a brand loyalty and will always choose one supermarket over another. If price is a factor, then sure some people will be turned, but if my preferred supermarket was £5 more for a weekly shop I would stick with them.
For one off purchases, price comparison sites such as http://www.priceinspector.co.uk makes sense, for food shopping I am not sure.