Ocado: supermarket shopping 4+

Deletes items at will

I’ve been using Ocado for years and have always had the same issue with the app; after you place items in the trolley, it will decide to delete some of them before checking out. This is incredibly frustrating because, like many people, I add things to my trolley as I think of them or notice we need them, then checkout once I’ve gone through all the cupboards and done the full shop. During this time (I assume if things temporarily go out of stock) the app will delete items but not notify the customer. With a full shop it’s impossible to go through and remember everything you’ve added and see anything that’s missing, so you then end up not receiving items you were expecting and needed. This desperately needs to be fixed, so that items stay in the trolley even when they’re out of stock, then the customer can be notified *if* they’re still out of stock when checking out. The only other way around this is to keep a physical list and cross check on checkout, which is more work and requires more time nobody has. Please sort it out, Ocado.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thanks for the review. We're sorry that you've had the problem of items being removed from your trolley before you have a chance to checkout. This isn't an issue that we're currently aware of, would you be able to contact us via one of our social media channels in order for us to look into this further? -Jack

Sack the designer of Oct ‘23 update

The Oct ‘23 app update is terrible. It has the most confusing UX: odd mixture of horizontal scrolling and vertical scrolling; layout and design changes only for the sake of it with no benefit to the user. This is bad use of your time and money Ocado and has made the app (even) worse for your customers. PS thank you for fixing the unfavouriting bug, but you’d already done it in a minor update to the older app. Roll back please. — I have been using the Ocado app pretty much since the beginning but in the last month or so have noticed that the app is really unstable. It, for example, freezes every time I unfavourite an item. It becomes totally unresponsive and I have to close the app to recover. Come on Ocado, that’s pretty basic! An update to this: in January the app crashed and wouldn’t let me check out from an order; it just kept going round. Now every time I open it, it shows me as editing the same (now weeks old) order: it lets me add items to it, but can’t check out and can’t open a new order until I have dealt with the open one! I have deleted the app and am hoping reinstall will fix it.

It’s also not possible to manage your payment cards anymore. One can only add more cards and switch between cards, but not remove. Come on…

Developer Response ,

Hi Catherine, we’re sorry the app freezes each time you unfavourite an item. It definitely shouldn’t be doing that, so we’d like to get more information from you to help us look into this. If you can, contact us through the app: Settings > Contact us > Email us > Something technical. If not, call us on 0345 656 1234, or email ocado@ocado.com and we’ll get you sorted. Thanks, the Ocado iOS team.

“High demand” is now a poor excuse

There’s something incredibly backward about the Ocado app experience now. I was a regular Ocado customer and loved the app, it demonstrated great progression in app development and made shopping a doddle. When lockdown hit, the app was taken down due to a huge surge in demand, which I understood - no app is built for hundreds of percent increase in traffic. That was 6 months ago. Even now, over a month after the app was supposedly back online, it still says they’re trying it out for a small number of customers - is the experience that bad that they still have to throttle it? What’s running the back-end, an ageing Windows XP server? Cloud computing is now of such intelligence, complexity and power that it can scale up to an almost infinite level of compute resource in a matter of seconds. The fact that Ocado is still hiding behind a resource ceiling from April is frankly poor IT management; If a supermarket that operates entirely online in the digital realm cannot run their app for half a year, they either need a new digital ops team or a new cloud computing solution (I can recommend Microsoft Azure). If you want to retain any shred of integrity as an online business, you’ll sort this out in time for your Christmas peak season.