FreshDirect: Grocery Delivery

I’m not going to focus here on how FreshDirect’s product range has gone downhill, or how they hardly ever offer promotional discounts to regular customers. I still use FreshDirect very often, and almost always place my orders through this app. For the most part, it’s decent and functional, but it falls far short of being great. You can do basic shopping through it, add a delivery tip, and pay by credit/debit card, MasterPass, or PayPal (not Apple Pay yet). However, after several years of using this app, there have been few enhancements. You still can’t rate items, create shopping lists, preorder or save items for later through it. You can’t use external coupons, scan barcodes, add delivery times to your calendar, or request items that are not in stock. You can’t even make a simple “favorites” list (there’s a section that shows you items you’ve previously purchased, but you can’t really use it as a favorites list because it doesn’t show everything, and you can’t edit out things you don’t want to reorder). These are commonplace features in other shopping apps. I’m not sure why FreshDirect wants to keep its app so primitive, but here we are. Despite being on the slow side and having occasional crashes, it serves its purpose well, and is adequate for placing basic orders.

This mediocre star rating is for the app, NOT FreshDirect itself. It could be so much better than it is. When it’s not crashing, freezing, or dragging, the app can easily be used for routine shopping and placing orders. I use it for that purpose at least once or twice a week. Unfortunately, there’s little else you can do with it besides shop. There’s no way to create lists, or to post or read item reviews (you can only see the star rating within the app, and few items have them). There’s also no way to request items that are not currently available. All of those seem like pretty basic features. FreshDirect has such a well earned reputation for its high quality products (many of which are locally sourced) and stellar customer service, and overall, I’m a very happy customer. It’s just too bad the app comes up short.

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I love the look and feel of the app, and the ability to grocery shop on your phone. But I do have a few friendly suggestions for improvement: ability to...create shopping lists, post reviews on items, request to restock an item, and leave a tip post-delivery on the app. I’ve left tips pre-delivery on the app, and noticed my deliveries would be late or they would leave it outside my door. If I could leave post-delivery tips on the app, i wouldn’t have to carry around cash and ensure I could reward more to great delivery drivers.

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You might think that, this being the year 2019, your cart will stay in sync between this app and the website. You would be quite wrong. So, let’s say you and your wife both log into the same account and add things to the cart, one on a desktop computer and one on the app. You’re going to be in for a nasty surprise when you realize that the carts are different — even though you are both logged into the same account — and you now have to reconcile this manually. It’s a pretty glaring omission at this point to not sync the contents of one’s cart between two platforms. But as others have said, this is an adequate app but not a good one.

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Barely functional because it couldn’t do one of the basic tasks of a shopping app - checkout. This was my first time using the app. I spent a lot of time picking items I want and adding them to cart. After adding items to cart, it kept giving the message. “Whoops. Sorry we’re experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later.” This also happened when I tried to add an address. Weirdly, after this happened, the items in my cart started appearing twice. I also tried their website and it was horribly broken - just no styling and mangled words and logo. I reached out to their Twitter handle and they were pretty prompt in replying. They said the website should work now, which I didn’t try. When I tried the app, I had to remove all the duplicate items in the cart and then the same problem still persisted. When I reached out, they replied stating I have to delete and reinstall the app. After I did this and did the whole dance again, the error STILL persisted. At which point I started writing this review.