Supermarkets divided on the merit of dotcom-only stores, warehouses or picking from high street shelves

Branches of Waitrose are usually found in only the most chichi of neighbourhoods but its west London branch is in such a grim area – on the edge of the Hangar Lane gyratory system – that even the buildings apologise to passersby.

Its neighbour, another squat 60s-style council block occupied by the posh catalogue firm Boden, has a sign hanging outside saying “ugly building, beautiful clothes”.

It’s just as well no shoppers will ever wheel their trolley over the threshold. It’s one of a new breed of so-called “dark stores” or dotcom only stores springing up around the country to satisfy Britons’ insatiable demand to shop for groceries from the comfort of their sofa rather than make the weekly shlepp to the supermarket.

For foodies who seek out Waitrose for its butcher’s counter where the assistant can wax lyrical about the best cut for your Sunday’s roast or who love to sniff the racks of freshly baked artisan bread, the soulless “dotcom fulfilment centre” would offer all the aesthetic joy of a Soviet-era supermarket with dingy strip lighting and austere shelving racks. “We are very low-tech,” said branch manager Noreen O’Meara unapologetically. “We are a branch without customers or rather we’ve got customers we can’t see. The face of the brand are the drivers – they’re the only people who see the customers.”

When the five-storey utilitarian building, originally used by sister chain John Lewis as a carpet warehouse, was deemed surplus to requirements Waitrose moved in last year. “We thought we could make it work as our first foray into dotcom,” said Waitrose e-commerce director Robin Phillips. “It’s pretty basic as a layout and we recycled a lot of old kit.”

The round-the-clock operation boasts a mock “shop floor” with aisles presented just as you would find them in a store open to the public. The usual temptations are there, particularly in the seasonal aisle, where boxes of Heston Blumenthal’s new hidden sauce figgy pudding nestle beside rows of panettone, mince pies and stollen. The only tweaks are a nod to the “virtual shopper” with extra rows of toilet paper, bottled water and baby food reflecting that online shoppers use home delivery services to transfer the pain of getting heavy and bulky items home.

There are also more hoodies and bobble hats in the aisles than in your average branch of Waitrose as an army of pickers wraps up warm to swarm through the aisles, picking six orders at a time. “We call ourselves personal shoppers,” said Susie Shackleton, one of the 180 partners working on the (virtual) shopfloor. “Accuracy is the most important thing,” she said. Bags of sugar and flour are placed carefully in cellophane bags “so it looks like we’ve gone the extra mile to care for the customer” – whose name she often recognises although she has never met them.

The shelves are replenished by the night shift and from 4am the operation cranks up again for the day ahead, with the first vans trundling out of the car park well before 6am. “I can’t believe people want their shopping at 6.30am but they do,” said O’Meara. Despite the antisocial hours the main gripes from staff are over which radio station plays over the loudspeakers. Divisions between fans of Capital, Absolute and Magic FM are bitter.

During the heady days of the dotcom boom when Webvan delivery vans were zipping around US cities, internet gurus predicted that by now we’d have temperature controlled lockers bolted to the side of our houses. But fast forward through a cruel decade that saw Webvan consigned to the dustbin of e-commerce history and meaningful profits continue to elude Ocado, the industry is still casting around for the right model.

Store bosses remain divided on the merits of filling orders from large, specialised warehouses – most notably Ocado’s super hi-tech base in Hatfield, north London – or getting staff to pick products from the shelves of their stores as Sainsbury’s does. Tesco and Asda do both, using dark stores to pick up the slack in the densely populated areas such as the south-east.

Despite having more than 3,000 stores, Tesco chief executive, Philip Clarke, has made investing in dotcom-only stores a “clear priority”. The market leader has four dark stores ringing London, in Enfield, Croydon, Aylesford and Greenford, with another three in prospect in Didcot, in Erith, near Dartford, and in Crawley. In a recent interview its internet boss, Ken Towle, said it aimed to build a national network and was scouting other cities, including Birmingham and Manchester, for locations.

Arch-rival Asda is also targeting online shoppers: it has two dark stores in Leeds and Enfield and recently announced plans for a third in Nottingham. Ocado, meanwhile, is ploughing £210m into a second distribution centre in Dordon, Warwickshire which opens next year. Sainsbury’s says it favours picking from store because it takes advantage of its existing network and makes for punctual deliveries, as drivers deliver to customers living nearby.

When the Acton centre opened last October the fleet of Waitrose vans was delivering about 2,000 orders a week but that figure will hit 7,500 by Christmas as its fledgling online service racks up growth of 100% year-on-year in London. For Waitrose the big win is that the price transparency of the internet is encouraging Britons to do more of their shopping with them. “They are doing a full weekly shop [with Waitrose] which they were not necessarily doing before,” said Phillips. “Our multichannel shoppers spend three times as much with us.”

Analysts at IGD, the grocery industry thinktank, estimate the online food and grocery market will almost double in size over the next five years to be worth £11.1bn. Last year internet home shopping accounted for £5.6bn out of the £156.8bn spent on groceries in 2011. “Although online grocery is still in its infancy it is evolving at a blistering pace,” said IGD chief executive Joanne Denney-Finch, pointing to increasing smartphone and tablet use together with 4G mobile technology. “Although online only currently represents 3.4% of the overall UK grocery market, it is the fastest growing sector.”