tesco

Tesco gift cards online

November 27, 2010 in All posts

As a way of saying thanks to the ineffable Becky & Tim (they put me up for a week in their living room whilst I was working in London), I wanted to buy them a gift voucher. Admittedly, Tesco’s isn’t what you’d call the epitome of either originality or awesomeness – but I ate their food and drank their drinks, so wanted to pay them back in kind. I know they shop at Tesco, so it seemed like a solid plan.

But Tesco seem to hate their gift cards. I can’t find one online for love nor money.

A search online for ‘tesco gift card’ returns some results – the main of which takes you to a rather abandoned-looking microsite:

Click to enlarge

Fair enough…but where can I actually buy one online? The homepage gives no indication at all, all the top nav items takes you away from the site, the left nav items take you to various pages that show you the pretty designs you can have, there’s an FAQ section – which says I can buy them in bulk by calling an 0845 number…aaaand there it is: you can’t buy them online. You have to buy them in-store.

Any reference to gift cards are also completely non-existent on the main Tesco site. Search for ‘gift card’ and you’ll get a bizarre selection of results:

This is a bad journey for a powerhouse like Tesco. It took me 5 mins of solid clicking & searching to find out that these can only be bought in-store. Seems a bit pointless to have a microsite dedicated to something that can’t be purchased online.

Moreover, why can’t they be purchased online? Missed a trick there, I reckon.