WENDY KNOWLER | How bad wording nearly wiped out my online shopping’s bog roll bargain

I like being able to choose my own products in an actual grocery store: to check the date marks for the freshest milk, compare prices on an actual shelf and pick out the best looking fresh produce.

So if I have the time, I shop for my groceries the old school way.

But how wonderful it is to have the option of online shopping and delivery when I’m under deadline pressure.

Especially when they stick to their promise of delivering in under an hour, which, remarkably, Checkers Sixty60 does. In my case, at least.

But as sharp as that app is, there are times when what works in an in-store setting doesn’t quite do the trick for the online experience.

So here’s what happened to me last week.

When placing an order I noticed a “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” offer on 12-packs of “luxury” BabySoft toilet rolls.

So instead of placing just one pack into my basket, I placed two, which is exactly what a special is designed to do — “upsell” the customers.

But the man who delivered my order a short while later pulled only two packs out of his delivery box.

The customer service consultant I spoke to a short while later told me the special offer doesn’t work like I thought it did.

“If you were in a supermarket you would have put three packs into your trolley and only paid for two,” she said.

“So you should have done the same online and the app would have automatically only charged you for two of them.”

But I wasn’t in a store. On the app, I didn’t have an opportunity to engage with anyone before paying, and the special said “Buy 2”, so I assumed the packers would have been told about the special and added a third.

Here’s the thing: the app gave absolutely no guidance on this to its shoppers.

When I asked if other customers had complained of a similar experience, the consultant heartily agreed. “Yes, lots!” she said, which was both refreshingly honest and quite annoying, given that she was insinuating we were all misguided.

“I think this is something that Sixty60 needs to work on urgently,” I told the company’s media team later.

And to their immense credit they did, after refunding me for that missing pack of toilet paper.

Conceding that the special offer was ambiguous, they changed the wording within 24 hours of my complaint.

“To avoid further ambiguity, our Sixty60 team has updated the multi-buy deal descriptions to read “BUY 3 PAY FOR 2”,” I was told.

“The “BUY 2 GET 1 FREE” wording aligns with in-store communication, but unfortunately didn’t provide customers with sufficient guidance on how to do so online.”

To benefit from the multi-buy promotion on the app, a customer is required to place all three products into their basket and the app automatically marks one of them as free.

“All customers who report that they expected a free item which wasn’t received are given back the value of the item in app credit immediately so that they still benefit from taking the deal.

“Thank you for helping us to improve the Sixty60 customer experience.”

And I’m told the customer engagement issue is being attended to, too.

Wonderful.

With online shopping having taken off like a rocket since Covid changed the way we live and work, it’s been a very steep learning experience for both the companies and their customers.

One last thing on the toilet paper issue — those luxury rolls only contain 200 sheets per roll, rather than the standard 350 sheets, which makes the price less special than one would have thought.

The rolls are not as tightly wound, for want of a better description, as the standard rolls, so they don’t look smaller. And there’s nothing on the pack, such as the word “Mini” to tell consumers that the rolls are smaller.

There’s just the number of sheets printed relatively small, on the side of the pack.

So, when buying toilet paper, don’t go on price alone. Standard one-ply toilet rolls are 500 sheets and their two-ply counterparts are 350 sheets.

Check the numbers!

I know, being a savvy shopper is exhausting.

*****

Is it acceptable for an airline to text passengers after 10pm the night before a morning flight, giving them less than 12 hours’ notice that their flight the next morning has been cancelled and they’ve been booked onto one departing an hour earlier?

That’s what I was asked last week by a relative of someone who was booked on Kulula’s 9.45am flight from Joburg to Cape Town, and told at 10.20pm the night before than his new flight was departing at 8:40am. He only saw that SMS at 6:40am, so he barely made the flight.

“I think it’s fair to say that many people would already have been asleep when that SMS landed, leaving them to discover only the next morning that they had to get to the airport an hour earlier than planned,” I said in an email to Kulula.

I asked what necessitated the last-minute change — a technical problem or did the airline realise there weren’t enough seats sold on the later flight, so they booked those passengers on an earlier one?

How many of them missed that flight as a result of the last-minute change, and how will they be compensated if it didn’t suit them to take a later flight?

Responding, the airline’s chief commercial officer, Des O’Connor, began by saying he fully understood the stress the passengers would have experienced, “and I am truly sorry”.

“I can confirm that it has absolutely nothing to do with merging flights because of commercial reasons,” he said.

“Rather, when the aircraft was undergoing its check the night before, which is standard practice, a technical issue was discovered.

“Thus the aircraft was not cleared for flight this morning and the passengers therefore had to be moved to another flight as close to the departure time as possible.”

Any passengers arriving too late would have been reaccommodated on a BA Comair or Kulula flight which was departing, he said, at no extra charge.

He didn’t say how many missed that flight.

An airline industry source told me such last-minute changes were justified if it was an issue beyond the airline’s control, but not if the cancellation was a commercial decision.

Good to know.