I’ve been doing my grocery shopping online on and off since about 2000 or 2001 and I believe Sainsburys was the first supermarket I’ve used for it, and I did stick with them for a while. Mostly now I use Tesco, though I’ve used Waitrose, Ocado, and ASDA too.
Today I found myself ordering from Sainsburys and I had possibly the worst user experience that I’ve had on any website since I can remember.
At random times, items would disappear from my shopping cart (and the total price would correspondingly drop) only to reappear later. Sometimes as much as £30 worth of shopping.
The page would randomly re-render at times, the various buttons, links, drop-downs, and checkboxes moving an inch. Many times this resulted in me clicking on things I didn’t want to click on and ending up on pages I had no interest in, only to have to get back to where I was.
At some point the delivery time I had chosen disappeared. (Yes, you have a limited amount of time you can hang onto the reservation before checking out, but I was well within that time.) When I chose a new one, all the shopping disappeared from my cart. I somehow managed to get the shopping back, but in doing so lost the delivery slot again. I was experiencing the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of Grocery Shopping — I could see what I was ordering or when it would be delivered, but not both.
When it came to checking out, I lost both and needed to start again from scratch.
Yes, right from an empty shopping cart.
Second time around, I didn’t experience the Heisenbug, and eventually somehow managed to check out.
What a pain though.
