I have been a regular customer of bigbasket.com for the past 3 months. Since frequency of my purchases are quite high, I want to share my experiences. With a little baby at home, it's very difficult for me or for my husband to go to the nearby supermarket for our weekly grocery purchase. Moreover, the fuel charges for commute and most importantly, the time required to step out and buy groceries, vegetables and fruits from the nearby shops (please note the plural word) made us look for an alternative. Thanks to twitter, I discovered BigBasket through one of my tweet acquaintances.
This is my unsolicited feedback.
First the pros.
- Shopping for groceries is highly convenient. I just can't be more happier about the time it saves for us.
- Cash on delivery - the payment method I prefer for products like vegetables/fruits where product quality cannot be guaranteed
- Friendly return policy - no questions asked. I have returned vegetables and dairy products a couple of times when I wasn't happy about the quality. Such occasions were very few, though
- Delivery guarantee - when I fix a time slot, they deliver promptly. Once when it was delayed by 30 minutes, they returned 10% of the order amount
- Vegetables are fruits are very fresh. Bread and Dairy products are always within the expiry date.
- Coming to the product -
- very easy-to-use, no clutter, no ads
- organized catalog of products. Initially, navigation was a bit clumsier and one could get lost in the individual product description page and wouldn't be easy to get back to the category page. They seem to have fixed it now, with the breadcrumb display.
- Time slot that I have blocked used to get released earlier. Now they have fixed this problem and I can hold onto a slot for 5 minutes.
- Notifications are perfect. I get an email and an SMS as soon as I place an order. When the order is to be delivered on a particular day, I get a SMS notification again which is useful
- Being an early customer, I get a 10% discount on the order value. That's a good savings for me.
- When I place an order for a certain list of items, I expect all the items to be delivered. Many times, there were 2-3 items that were either unavailable or weren't delivered. If I need to visit a physical store to buy these items, then the whole purpose of ordering from an online store gets lost
- The other irritating issue is the quantity. I'm not sure if the delivery guy (or the person who packs the items) even looks at the quantity of an item ordered. If I order 2 packs of a certain item, he delivers only one.
- Because of these issues, I always go for cash-on-delivery so I don't have to pay for items that were not delivered
- Search box - doesn't give me the items I search for, though the items are available when you navigate through the menu. For instance, search for Coconut.
- Product names do not support multiple languages
- As I mentioned earlier, I get an SMS on the day of delivery but the SMS doesn't contain the amount that I need to pay. It would be good to get this data so I can keep the cash ready
- My Shopping List - I find this feature to be totally useless. It is a huge list of items that I have ordered since my first order with no categories or any form of organization. It can be categorized based on the same tab structure or based on my frequency of purchase
- Good-to-have feature - An event can be added to my calendar if I have scheduled a delivery on a specific time slot.
- Ability to edit my order placed - Would be good to add/modify a few items to an existing order. There can be a cut-off time before which an order can be edited
- Order status - orders which have been delivered weeks ago still show as "Ready to ship". What's the purpose of this status then?
- Last but not the least - the plastic trays they use for packing vegetables and fruits look trendy and neat but also a serious concern to our environment. I would be more than happy to return those trays if they can reuse them.