Why we didn't switch to Ocado

I've probably blethered on here before about how we do 90% of our food shopping via WaitroseDeliver and very good they are too. Items are picked from our local store on the other side of Cambridge and are delivered for free currently¹.

But we had a very minor problem with the last order and I'd previously spoken to a friend of mine who uses Ocado so we thought we'd try them. They offer the same range of goods as Waitrose (Waitrose were one of the partners in setting it up) but delivered from warehouses rather than a shop.

On the plus side:

• They offer one hour delivery slots (rather than two hour from Waitrose).
• Their web site is rather better than Waitrose with a better search engine and some nice features for reviewing your order. It's very responsive too.
• Their minimum order is £40 rather than £50.
• They price match on Tesco prices for branded products and are cheaper than Waitrose stores on Waitrose products.

On the minus side:

• They do charge for delivery, at a variable rate depending on the slot you choose, and the price varies a lot, from free (late on Saturday night for example) to £6.49 (on Saturday morning).
• Customer support is on an 0845 number (Waitrose is 0800).

So we placed our first order on Tuesday morning. I'd picked a late afternoon slot on Friday and the slot picker claimed I'd be charged £5.49 for delivery but when I got the order confirmation through it said delivery would be £5.99.

So I went back to the slot picker page to check and at the bottom there was the following small print:

Our order was a little less than £75. So OK, there's a minimum charge of £3. Fine. But our delivery charge was already more than the minimum, why were we being charged 50p more?

The order confirmation email said:

so I emailed thus a few minutes later:

Silence from them. No acknowledgement email even.

Two days past and on Thursday morning I forwarded a copy of my original email to adding:

Still nothing. Meanwhile I was hearing and discovering other things. Like the dispute they'd had with Tesco over the price match, and that all those prices which they claimed were cheaper than Waitrose were ... but by precisely 1p for every item I'd checked. That seemed like sharp practice to me.

By now I was getting a little pissed off with Ocado. I'd not been having a good week with migraines every day and what had started over a simple question about 50p was now turning into a failure to respond to a new customer. At all.

At 5:25pm on Thursday I went back onto Ocado's web site and found a contact form and asked whether they were going to reply to either of my previous emails before bed time. In seconds I got this email back:

I'm afraid I lost it at that point and I banged off this reply:

It probably won't surprise you to hear that no one contacted me by bed time so I cancelled the order.

At 1:49pm today, just before we set off to drive to Waitrose to shop in person for a change, my mobile rang. Yup, it was a man from Ocado to explain the mystery of the 50p. Turns out that "For orders below £75, there is a minimum charge of £3 and a maximum of £6.49" means "we will charge you some amount between £3 and £6.49 ... but we're not going to tell you what it is until after you place your order".

I don't think that's clear from the web page but I explained it really didn't matter any longer, that taking over three days to respond to a simple query didn't cut it and I suggested he might like to feed that back to his manager.

1. Although frankly it was still worth it in the days when they charged £5 a time.