Sainsbury don't seem to understand that families shop together (and incrementally)

[andrewducker]

We have a Sainsbury shopping account, complete with delivery subscription. I use it to make our regular food/household stuff orders.

If Jane also wants something picked up she can't just add it to the shopping basket herself, I have to either log in on a device and then hand her control, or she has to tell me and then I put things in the basket for her.

It seems like the most obvious thing in the world that I should be able to have a shared basket with her.

On top of which, the way the whole thing works seems more aimed to Amazon-style shopping, where you choose everything you want, and then checkout when you're done. Amending an order is a huge faff, requiring you to effectively uncheckout and then go back through a 4 step checkout each time.

Whereas I want to be able to make a note of everything I want, as I encounter each new thing during the week, and then trigger the "and now check out" process when I want it to happen. Either manually when there's something I need, or automatically when we get to the normal day for deliveries. And also, as mentioned above, give other people permission to update the shopping list.

Does any shopping app work that way?

Comments

[aldabra]

Tesco doesn't. With the added annoyance that when you go back in on Wednesday to add things to your list for next Monday it spontaneously deletes anything on the list which it is currently out of stock of; it doesn't even give you the option of leaving it on the list and getting a substitute if they're still out of stock on Monday. This makes Brexit shortages and Christmas very annoying.

Does Sainsbo let you keep mini-lists and add them in? Tesco used to and discontinued it, and the thing that would improve it most for me would be adding it back in, so I could say "I want these four meals this week" and then go through the resulting list and deleting anything I happen to have in abundance already.

The downside to the only-check-out-once model is that you forget to do it and get none of your shopping instead of an incomplete subset. But they could skip the three pages of offers and suggestions.

[rmc28]

The Ocado app lets you fill up a basket indefinitely until you are ready to check it out, and also lets you make one-off additions, but to do a proper edit (take things out) requires going through the multi-step checkout.

It doesn't allow shared baskets, but fanf and I use a shared email address / password to manage the Ocado orders. (We do sometimes order from other supermarkets, and I use the same shared email address for all supermarket orders, so fanf at least gets the email notification, and can optionally get the password from me / 1password if needed.)

[ninetydegrees]

Is Amazon not affiliated with a supermarket chain in your area? Because, when it is, it lets you do most of the things you mention.

[jack]

I know some friends use Ocado and somehow manage to mutually update the basket. It might well be just "have a shared login", that's the only method I've heard about. This is a case when that's not terrible -- probably there's not that much risk of anything going wrong if you share your supermarket account with someone you're buying groceries with jointly anyway, although I don't understand why now online accounts are more normal, almost nowhere has any model other than "no, it's all tied to you personally, good luck" (with the exception of some streaming game/tv devices, which still seem to have quite an ideosyncratic approach to it).

[alithea]

Yes, Bulb let me add Kev to my account but they still only email me about the account so I don't know what the point of registering him was!

[calimac]

Amazon book shopping works that way. You can put items in your cart, or in your wish list, and leave them there for some long period of time (though not, I think, indefinitely). Dunno if it works for their grocery services.

What I do is keep a file (in Excel). Every time I order something new I add it to the file, so it has a complete list of everything we normally get. One column has quantity needed; if we're not ordering the item it's blank. Then when it's time to submit the weekly order I just look up everything on the grocer's site and add it to the cart. After the order arrives, I wipe the quantity column blank and start over.

Having our own file has the further advantages that it's not cluttered up with the stuff we don't want, and we can still mark things the store is temporarily out of and won't let us order.

[stormclouds]

Ever since Sainsbury's insisted you enter an SMS code to gain access to your account it's made doing joint orders much more difficult. We currently use a Facebook group message to add things to the list. Then there's an alarm set for the night before so we can actually add them. It's a nuisance. And the multiple pointless pages you have to click through to check out is annoying too.

I'm not aware of any shop that does this well.

[danieldwilliam]

The Tesco ordering process seems to be incremental.