Online shopping -still a long way to go

The pandemic is serving as a catalyst for change – primarily on the consumer shopping behaviour, which has evolved so much in the last few months.

The initial lockdown in March put stress on the way we normally live our lives, and online trading became a landmark for shifting consumer behaviours.

So we thought that retailers (should’ve) invested in ecommerce for both the online and offline customer experience, after the first lockdown’s lessons. It’s not so much the case as some still faced issues when shopping online.

“Online ordering only works when you have ‘ample time' to compromise - just to wait in an ‘online queue’ for hours and hours. Yet most of the leading supermarkets on online website platforms, fairly easily run out of stocks or the maximum orders per day. Yesterday, I tried logging into the three leading supermarket chains’ website - yet the technology is nothing but a waste-of-time unless you have ‘luck’ in Colombo,” a consumer told the Business Times. She claimed that capacity wasn’t enhanced.

Let’s say, you somehow spend 15-20 minutes waiting in an ‘online queue’ and get a chance to log-in, again the technology fails you, if the payment doesn’t go through, another customer added noting that, “it is a waste-of-time for people like me, who have businesses to run and work to do during office hours. Especially, after allocating around 40 minutes overall, from waiting to selecting items one- by one, and finally the scheduling calendar doesn’t work, or doesn’t have dates to be delivered anytime within the next six to seven days.”

The online supermarket mobile apps are still often times crowded and temporarily out of order, some claim.

“Most interestingly, when discussing with friends the obvious failed attempts of online ordering, they advised to log- in to the websites around midnight or late night hours to make the order, and that is how it is easily done. Now if we are already running a business, and taking care of the home front with children, pets and many other things; you have to be ready to painfully 'waste time' just to make a decent grocery online order,” a mother of two, also running a business said.

It is quite pathetic, when you have systems but still not functional enough to support the working women and men, without asking too much of their productive time wasted ‘unproductively', a working mother noted.

“When the order is finally placed and ready to be delivered, a message pops up saying ‘ due to the high order volumes we are experiencing, there can be delays in your delivery. Kindly bear with us,” a customer in Dehiwela said noting that almost all modern trade outlets haven’t enhanced their capacity up to the mark.

It wasn’t that bad for all customers, though.

‘Better than last time’, was how some others mentioned their online shopping. “When I tried on Sunday to log in I was constantly put in a queue, so I got up at 4.30 on Monday morning and placed an orderreceived it Tuesday evening,” another online shopper added.

“Generally all have been good. But lack of goods make it messy for most service providers,” a banker noted.