S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

I ordered viagrame wine through Sainsburys online shopping. A decent enough Chianti - half price - total steal at £4.99. Ordered 24 bottles. When the delivery didn’t arrive I called customer services only to be told that (a) any order of more than 10 of the same thing had to be ordered a week in advance and (b) it was at the local store’s discretion whether they would fulfil the delivery. Nice of you to say so before I checked out, guys.

So I spoke to a nice girl on the ring road outside Bangor (where Sainsbury’s customer service is now located) who kindly reorganised the delivery for a week from that day.

It arrived tonight. This would have been good, as I was ready for a nice glass of red, but Sainsburys managed to mangle my sanity.

I discovered a neat little trick on their part - a lovely little condition buried under bad web design and ambiguous copy even when you find it - that you actually pay the price of the item on your delivery date. This is laughably insane. The offer had expired since I checked out, and the price I paid at checkout was absolutely meaningless. I was charged the full price for the wine - £10 a bottle, so an extra £120!!

Even when you read the terms on their site it says :

Add to your trolley the stated combination of products from the list below and you’ll only be charged the offer price at checkout.

Is it just me, or does that imply that when I check out, I get the offer?

As far as I am concerned, this is in line with all other websites, and is what the user expects. If I buy something at Amazon that is on offer, I check out and I get the offer price. I don’t wait a week for delivery to discover that in the intervening period, the special offer has expired and therefore I have to pay full price. That’s how things work, right? Not at Sainsbury’s. Its ridiculous. And combined with their rule about bulk orders taking an extra week, it seems particularly unfair. Never once in any email or conversation with customer services was this fact mentioned.

Sainsbury’s web designers also seem to have an issue with usability. They use the same elements in their pages - sometimes as ‘information’ graphics, sometimes as buttons that link to crucial information. As far as I know, pathfinding should be made clear. On one page (I will not put a link, as that would work in their favour), there is a little graphic:

It is not clickable. Yet on another page, there is exactly the same image - but this time it IS clickable, and in fact is the very thing the girl at customer services I spoke to tonight told me was the essential link to find out the terms of the offer. Appalling design… and misleading.

I am aware that what I describe above is a bit of a “grumpy old man” whinge about something that is not very important in the grand scheme of things. But I just felt the urge to make sure this information was on the web… along with a strong advisory note to stay away from Sainburys Online Shopping bollocks, and use Ocado instead, who are much more efficient and present their offers without ambiguity.