Ocado and the Impact of Online Opinion

We have Tesco delivering to us on a fairly regular basis. No problems.

Personally I enjoy physical food shopping at Waitrose. No problem; in fact the experience at Waitrose in Woodley on Christmas Eve was excellent.

So I thought about using Ocado for home deliveries. A quick search and the following article was found quite quickly:

In our fairly short tenure as a customer we’ve had over a dozen deliveries. We’ve also had an unprecedented reoccurring problem with goods turning up damaged. We’ve even had an incident where fresh fruit arrived so mouldy, some items had already turned to mulch, plus a couple of incidents of bakery goods turning up completely stale and a few items that never turned up at all (but remained on the bill).

Around £80 of food and non-food items have been compromised across our dozen-or-so deliveries to date. It’s a large amount of money to have to refund to one customer, and can’t be helping Ocado’s bottom line.

It is also problematic as it undermines the main point of online grocery ordering – we buy online and have it delivered to our home so we don’t have to go to the store (for various reasons we rarely have time anymore). Yet with the high degree of damaged goods, we still end up regularly hitting a traditional supermarket to replace damaged, missing or otherwise compromised items.

via chrisgreen.co.uk (PS: 24/07/2020 Originally sourced 11 January 2011, page now no longer available).

Based on that I may leave it for a while!

Kevin Harrington

I’m a UK-based B2B marketing consultant, specialising in strategic advice for SME business owners. I bring extensive hands-on expertise to every client engagement. Senior leadership roles across technology, media, payments, and publishing have shaped my practical approach. Highlights include serving as Chief Marketing Officer at The Panoply plc (now TPXimpact), Chief Commercial Officer at Tungsten Network, and Global Marketing Director at BBC Worldwide. Over the years, I’ve guided numerous SMEs through transformation and value creation. Helping businesses evolve and thrive is a genuine passion. Practical marketing insights and succession planning strategies are at the heart of what I do, as I believe growing a business’s asset value should be a rewarding and positive journey for every entrepreneur.

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