Sainsbury's To You: Sometimes

A couple of years ago I wrote about Sainsbury’s unreliability. I don’t think much has improved since then, and there hasn’t been a week when everything on my list was on their shelves. Becoming increasingly frustrated with the experience, I decided to sign up for their home shopping service Sainbsbury’s To You.

I love shopping on the Internet. I can search to my heart’s content, mull things over as much as I need to, and buy what I want when I feel like it. So including the weekly grocery shop ought to be a breeze. In some ways it is, but the experience has been far from straightforward so far, and my concerns about the retailer’s reliability have not been dissipated in any way.

I have now had four deliveries. None has included everything I ordered, and from three of them items were missing altogether (though charged and paid for). Today’s shortfall comprised five items, including the two most expensive. On the plus side, three of the four deliveries were made within the allocated time, the fourth was half-an-hour early. (There is a 1 hour delivery promise: “We promise to deliver your order within the 1 hour timeslot. If we are 1 second late, we will give you a £10 voucher on the doorstep you can use to get money off your next shop”. This apparently doesn’t extend to being half-an-hour early.)

When Sainsbury’s cannot provide a particular item, it has a go at providing something close. Unlike the Tesco equivalent, you cannot turn this option off, though you can send the substitute items back with the driver, and will receive appropriate credit through your charge/credit card. About two thirds of the time, the substitutions have been just about OK, but on two separate occasions I have been sent chicken gravy in place of chicken stock, and today a particular variety of tomato was substituted with another, which I had ordered anyway! On another occasion I had to send back some cans of tomatoes that were crushed beyond recognition (the cans as well as the tomatoes).

Half the deliveries have been followed by a phone call to Sainsbury’s to report missing items (on a third occasion I just didn’t bother). This should not be necessary. I probably should have gone through each delivery, item-by-item, before signing for it but I should not have to delay the driver unnecessarily in this way. The phone call is inevitably to a call centre in a distant land (I would guess Ireland in this case), and subject to the usual button-pushing monologue and long waits listening to dreadful canned music. Once through, however, the response has by and large been helpful, and a refund voucher has been emailed which I can deduct from the next order (assuming there will be one).

Ordering online is fairly straightforward, and it is possible to build up a basket over an extended period of time, though I learnt the hard way to hit the ‘save and exit’ button after adding new items. Searching for items is not very satisfactory: for example, the search function didn’t find carnaroli rice (because the catalogue mis-spells it as carnarolli rice), or creme fraiche (possibly because it expects accented characters). Also, creme fraiche is classified under ”Yoghurts, Desserts and Custards” rather than “Milk, Cream and Eggs” as one would expect.

A very useful feature is the ability to display a list of recently-purchased items (either online, or in the store if you have a Nectar card). This can be displayed “aisle by aisle” or as a straight list, though in the latter it is listed by “aisle” and often duplicates items, which can be confusing: I expect them to appear just once).

A big disappointment is that the online catalogue is incomplete: there are items I can buy in my local store (which as it happens is also the one that delivers to us) that I cannot find online. I have been told “Not all products are available nationally and many products are sold only in certain stores. Please be aware that the store that delivers your shopping may not be your local store…” (actually, the drivers tell me it is) “…and that product range may vary considerably. Please log into your account and use the search facility in locating the products you desire. If these products are not listed then the Sainsbury’s store that delivers to you does not stock them. It may well be that you will have to buy these products instore and not via the website.” (Thereby totally defeating the purpose of shopping online in the first place).

This is clearly incorrect, and a great pity. Given its extraordinary investment in logistics, it should not be beyond Sainsbury’s wit to make the widest-possible range of goods available to online shoppers.

Posted by Chris Bunch at April 24, 2005 05:38 PM