Get Groceries Delivered

If you don't want to be bothered with going to the supermarket every day or if you don't want to drag home five-liter bottles of water on the metro, there are a number of stores in Moscow that offer home delivery of groceries from orders made online. The Sedmoi Continent supermarket chain offers free delivery within the Moscow Ring Road (MKAD) for orders over 1,500 rubles. Deliveries can be made up to 50 kilometers outside the MKAD for an additional 10 rubles per kilometer. Their site, https://dostavka.7cont.ru, boasts more than 12,000 products. While sorting through the categories to make an intial order is extremely time-consuming, items can be added or subtracted from future orders based on that initial basket of goods. You can select a two-hour window for delivery and the service will call you within 10 minutes of when you place the order to confirm the time. Around the time of delivery they may call again if their warehouse is out of the particular item ordered to ask if they can make a substitution -- usually a different brand or a different size of the chosen product. Sedmoi Continent discount cards also apply to Internet delivery orders.

Sluzhba 77 (www.service77.ru) also uses a similar system of order and delivery. One of the earliest of these services, Sluzhba has re-emerged in the past year, after a short absence from the market. Their prices tend to be slightly cheaper than Sedmoi, but they only offer free delivery on orders over 2,000 rubles. Sluzhba will deliver up to 30 kilometers outside the MKAD, if you add on 15 rubles per kilometer.

Utkonos (http://utkonos.ru) has much lower prices than either Sluzhba or Sedmoi Kontinent, but the process for ordering and delivery is significantly less user-friendly. Instead of using an online catalog you have to download a catalog of goods in either an Excel or zip file from the web site. However, because the catalog changes every week, they are much less likely than the other sites to be sold out of a particular item. And before you can make an order, you first have to visit a store to pick up a CD-ROM and a frequent buyer card. If you register your passport with the store, you can order up to 60,000 rubles' worth of goods, but otherwise you are limited to 2,000 rubles per order. You can choose to pick the order up at the store or to have it delivered for the minimal fee of 99 rubles, either between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. or between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Utkonos will deliver anywhere within Moscow or the Moscow region.