Order apple juice, get chardonnay!

Perils of online shopping are revealed

DOING your weekly shop on a computer, tablet or smartphone has an obvious appeal.

However, this apparently simple and convenient approach has created a new syndrome – ‘substitution frustration’.

Supermarkets are offering replacement products when items on the online shopping list are not available – with some very bizarre results. one shopper claimed that a bag of salad was replaced with a bar of Dairy Milk chocolate. Another who ordered apple juice got a bottle of chardonnay.

And a customer who ordered a pack of condoms, rather unfortunately, apparently received a pregnancy test- ing kit. the details emerged in a survey of more than 7,000 online shoppers by the consumer group Which?. It asked participants to give details of their substitution frustrations.

Asda was rated worst, with nearly half of customers – 48 per cent – saying they received a substitute product in their online shopping in the previous six months. these included one who ordered clothes hangers but received dog food, and another who ordered mayonnaise but got window cleaner, said Which?.

Amazon Fresh was rated next worst, with 37 per cent of shoppers getting substitutions, followed by Waitrose Deliver (33 per cent) and tesco online (30 per cent).

Iceland, which was named best online supermarket by Which? last month, topped the list with a 12 per cent record on substitutes.

online supermarkets allow users to say they don’t want alternatives sent. Among shoppers in the Which? survey who wished they had exercised that option was one sent dog food instead of gluten free bread, and others who got a sack of onions rather than a bottle of wine and tampons instead of baby food. Shoppers can also decline the product at the point of delivery.

Which? has been unable to verify each claim made by people taking part in the survey and so has not named the stores involved. Magazine editor Rich- ard Headland said online supermarkets that don’t make many substitutions tend to get a better customer scores in surveys.

‘Substitutions can have a big impact on how satisfied customers are, so supermarkets should make every effort to get orders right first time,’ he said.

An Asda spokesman said: ‘We are working on both reducing substitutions and improving the way we manage them.’