Fresh and Easy Buzz’s blogspot blog on Homeplus provides an amazing example of how innovative ideas combined with technology can translate into a great deal of gain for both companies and consumers.

A few years ago, the South Korean grocery outlet Homeplus was the second largest grocery retailer in Korea. Trailing behind E-Mart, the largest grocery retailer in Korea, Homeplus could not close the gap between itself and its chief rival through conventional means chiefly due to the fact that E-Mart’s grocery outlets outnumbered Homeplus stores 7:5.

A few year later, Homeplus has now overtaken E-Mart as the premier grocery outlet company in South Korea through the use of an experimental method of selling groceries online using QR code labelled shopping centers in subway stations.

By utilizing these quick and on-the-go methods of shopping combined with the fact that Koreans are the fourteenth hardest working people in the world and therefore despise wasting time shopping for groceries, Homeplus was able to secure a portion of the grocery market that had previously been unexplored.

Sometimes its not the best business plan or product that decides the success of the business. It can be as simple as one idea that can determine the difference between first and second.