The BBC's John Moylan reports: "Even those coming late to the internet can be first to exploit it"

Although a number of the country's major food outlets run Internet operations, Iceland says its new service will give the widest coverage so far.

The announcement comes as a soon-to-be-released survey suggests online shopping in the UK is beginning to boom.

The Net service will extend the chain's existing telephone service

From 4 October, surfers will be able to order groceries through the Iceland Website 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Their electronic shopping lists will be transmitted to the nearest store and the foods delivered in a refrigerated van the following day.

Iceland will demand a minimum £40 order and will only offer the service to customers who live within a 10-mile (16km) radius of their local store (three mile radius for those within the M25). However, the company says this essentially covers 97% of the UK population.

Net competition

Online shopping has become the latest battleground in what is already an intense supermarket war.

The Tesco chain has begun selling a personal organiser with a built-in bar-code reader for online orders. Electronic shopping is available to its customers in selected parts of the country.

Safeway runs a very similar scheme while the John Lewis group has set up Waitrose@work, making large scale deliveries to workers at companies such as ICL and British Airways who have ordered goods over their intranets.

Tesco have a bar-code reader for online orders

But Iceland believes its Freeshop service can lead the field.

"When you read the papers you believe that every other food retailer is already offering this service and they are not," says Malcolm Walker, Chief Executive of Iceland Frozen Foods plc.

"They are only offering it in a few selected stores. We've been national for home shopping by telephone for almost a year already, and we're going to be the first by a long way to offer national Internet shopping."

Alan Stevens, the Editor of the Consumers' Association Which?Online service, says the Iceland announcement reflects the findings of their latest Internet survey to be published next week.

"Internet shopping is taking off at an enormous rate. There has been a huge increase since last year in the number of people shopping online," he told BBC News Online.

"However, we're still finding that many people believe the Net is full of credit card fraud."