Food retailer Iceland is investing £2.4m in data warehousing to analyse its customers' online buying habits as it bids to up its share of their internet shopping basket.

Iceland is working with NCR to implement its Teradata-based Worldmark servers to replace 37 separate management information systems.

"We wanted one version of the truth across the whole group to get a single view of what customers are buying across all our channels," said Martin Chatwin, information systems director at Iceland Foods.

The company re-branded itself as Iceland.co.uk in March in the hope of establishing itself as a leading online supermarket.

"The average order size on the internet is six times that in store, and is 20 per cent higher than orders placed through our call centre. Internet ordering is already equivalent to four or five new stores at 10 per cent of the cost," said Chatwin.

Iceland currently receives 10,000 internet orders per week, at an average of £60 per order. It lags behind the most successful online grocer, Tesco.com, which takes over £5m worth of orders each week.

First published in Computing