By James Atkinson
Coles is working hard to improve its online liquor retail offering, parent company Wesfarmers said, as analysts criticised its failure to compete with the multichannel format provided by Woolworths.
As Wesfarmers revealed the retailer's liquor problems, analyst David Thomas, of brokerage CLSA, yesterday questioned management on why First Choice Liquor does not yet offer online transactions to consumers.
"[And] First Choice still is very much an inferior presentation style [to Dan Murphy's]," he said.
Wesfarmers finance director Terry Bowen responded that liquor "probably had the worst IT systems" of any Coles division when it was taken over by Wesfarmers.
"We've just spent the last year putting a new enterprise resource planning system into liquor," he said.
"Unless you've got all your back end tight, then it's very hard to do a lot of the front end stuff," Bowen said.
"Some of the impediments in that business are being sorted out."