{"id":1650,"date":"2014-09-03T09:39:50","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T15:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=1650"},"modified":"2014-08-27T10:18:36","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:18:36","slug":"king-soopers-please-fix-your-homeshop-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1650","title":{"rendered":"King Soopers, Please Fix Your HomeShop Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"groceries
Photo by State Library and Archives of Florida<\/a> <\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

King Soopers<\/a> is leaving money on the table.<\/p>\n

I tweeted about this a while ago<\/a>, but thought it was worth expanding into a full blog post.<\/p>\n

Now, first, let me say that I haven’t used new shopping services like Instacart, but I agree with Gary Vee<\/a> (link is a video, you want to go to 6:50)–home shopping gives me more time and that is an extremely precious commodity that I am willing to trade money for.<\/p>\n

King Soopers, for readers outside of Colorado, is one of the two major grocery store chains–it’s owned by Kroger, a name that may be more familiar to you.\u00a0 (The other is Safeway, and they don’t do home delivery to my area.)\u00a0 The King Soopers online shopping experience, is abysmal.<\/p>\n

Let me count the ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It’s difficult to find the link from their home page (here it is if you want to try King Soopers HomeShop<\/a>).<\/li>\n
  2. There is no clear delivery map–you have to enter your address and then you find out if they do deliveries to your location.<\/li>\n
  3. The UI of the shopping experience hasn’t changed since 2009 (the first time I used it).<\/li>\n
  4. Searching is tough–synonyms are not handled (searching for ‘scallions’ returns no produce results, whereas searching for ‘green onions’ does, even though they are the same vegetable<\/a>).<\/li>\n
  5. Product description for produce is unclear. For instance, here is the description some onions: “King Soopers\/Onions Yellow Organic Fresh Produce (Each)<\/span>“, but the price is is by the pound.\u00a0 So, when I put in 1 into the quantity section, am I getting one onion or one pound of onions?\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/li>\n
  6. Sorting is limited to ‘Brand’ or ‘Description’.\u00a0 That’s right folks, an ecommerce site where you can’t sort on price.<\/li>\n
  7. Browse options are not clear–they have an ‘aisle’ metaphor, but organic produce is in a different category than regular produce.<\/li>\n
  8. Product images are spotty.<\/li>\n
  9. They don’t have a submit event fire when you hit ‘enter’ in the search box.\u00a0 To be fair, this issue only affects FireFox.<\/li>\n
  10. They don’t have every product a store has.\u00a0 But wait, aren’t they fulfilling from the same warehouse?\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, why would you ever use King Soopers HomeShop?\u00a0 Because home delivery is so dang easy, and spending an extra $11 to not have to go to the store is worth it, especially for a big shopping trip.\u00a0 There are other reasons as well:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • No (or far fewer) impulse buys.\u00a0 Maybe this is the reason they aren’t investing in this product?<\/li>\n
    • You can save a list of staples and just re-order it.<\/li>\n
    • Did I mention they deliver food to your house?\u00a0 The drivers have been very nice, and even brought the bags into our house at times.<\/li>\n
    • The UI for picking a pickup time is good, and I haven’t encountered any traffic jams.<\/li>\n
    • I’ve been happy about the quality of non fungible items I’ve had picked out for me (such as lettuce).<\/li>\n
    • They are good about substitutions.\u00a0 If something you request is out of stock, there are three choices: ‘no substitutions, just omit’ or ‘please substitute’.\u00a0 If you choose the latter, you can either accept or reject the substitution at delivery.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      But the best reason for using HomeShop is the convenience of having your food delivered to you for a reasonable price.\u00a0 As a busy person, this is huge.<\/p>\n

      I really really want King Soopers to repair the crappy parts of this service and make it amazing.\u00a0 Heck, I’ll even consult with you on it.\u00a0 Home delivery is a win in so many ways–please fix it, King Soopers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        King Soopers is leaving money on the table. I tweeted about this a while ago, but thought it was worth expanding into a full blog post. Now, first, let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,33,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology-and-society","category-useful-tools","category-web-applications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1650"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1654,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650\/revisions\/1654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}