While (or should I say when) I live in Cape Town, I do live in a slightly rural part, so don’t have much in the way of food delivery.
No uber eats, and the only junk food delivery is so-so pizza (Debonair’s).
Grocery delivery on the other hand seems to be picking up, as this last year – (referrring to 2020 – seeing as we’re barely into 2020+1), I now have two, yes two grocery delivery options.
Checkers Sixty60, and newly open for our area – PnP Bottles (to be reviewed in a subsequent post).
Both have similar costs for delivery – R35, and same day (or next day) delivery.
Checkers Sixty60
I ordered from Checkers Sixty60 last month. Annoyingly you can’t order from their website, only from their app. I find that a bit of a downside, they could easily replicate the functionality on a webapp (which is pretty much what their iOS / Android app is anyway).
That said, the app is actually quite good – signup is easy, searching for items is good excellent with fuzzy searching / result sets returned, and similar items recommended.
The UI is also fairly decent. I’m happy with it anyway, and I’m generally a cantankerous grumpy old man when it comes to dof decisions in app design.
You can only order a limited amount of items through the app – this ties in to be roughly what they can fit into the motorbike pannier / basket.
As an example of this – I could order 11 individual bottles of sparkling water, but no more.
My overall order experience was not as good as the app, which I’ll detail in a brief moment.
Ordering via the app was a breeze, and delivery was scheduled for an hour later.
Delivery wasn’t on time, but close enough. Delivery guy actually went past and drove off, so I had to run out and tell him to turn around.
Items were packed well – I’d actually say overpacked – the brown paper bags used could have been fuller. The bag quality is excellent, and will definitely be reused by me.
Delivery guy was friendly, but other than delivering items, had no way to process things like returns or items not ordered/incorrect. He was also clueless about anything other than ‘here are your items’. The delivery vehicle (a motorbike) was branded with the checkers logo on the sides of the back box. I forgot to note if the driver had any other ID on them to say “Checkers delivery staff”, but it was fairly obvious it was indeed a Checkers order.
One of my items got swapped out for another item. Luckily I caught that before the driver left, but there was nothing I could do in person. There was also no mechanism in the app for complaints or returns, and the delivery guy wouldn’t accept the wrong item to return, so I was stuck with it.
In retrospect, I could have checked don’t swap out items in the Checkers Sixty60 app, but its onerous to do this for each and every item in a shopping list. Their app needs to have a global option for that, or at least subsequently warn the buyer that a swap will happen prior to confirming the delivery.
None of that happened.
Delivery was free this time around, as I used a free delivery with your first order coupon.
While the majority of the order was correct, getting stuck with an item that I didn’t want, and couldn’t return soured me on the experience, especially when that replacement was double the cost of what I ordered, and not what I wanted.
That item also turned out to be melted into a gooey mess (but its been a month in the freezer since I ordered, and I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything about that now).
Lesson’s – check your order carefully and don’t let the driver leave until everything is counted and correct.
My score – 2.5/5 (see updates below for final score)
– The app side (for ordering at least) is excellent.
– I’ve deducted another point for the delivery size limitations, and another point and a half for lack of return procedures.
– The procedures need work, especially for complaints / issues, but I would use it again if I had better mechanisms for issues*.
—
I’ve subsequently gone back into my orders on the Checkers Sixty60 App.
(Orders / My Orders / Order #), and now see a Submit an Issue button.
I’m not sure if this is new to the App, as I looked all over the app previously for a complaint mechanism, and didn’t see it at the time, and there have been App Store Updates for the App. Either way, it needs to be far more visible / obvious.
The delivery driver had no clue about anything so couldn’t advise.
I suggest better training for drivers, and making this a lot more visible in the app. With that said, I’m going to return the 1.5 points I deducted, as this seems to be sort of resolved, although how the process will work I’ll have to leave to another order and update this again. I’m deducting another 1/2 point off for the UIX deficiencies though.
Updated Score – 3.5/5
