The recent RedMart-Lazada merger does not seem to be going well with several customers, who have complained that the new system has glitches that make online grocery shopping inconvenient instead of hassle-free.
Online grocery shopping portal RedMart was founded in August 2011 to help make grocery shopping easier for customers by allowing them to purchase groceries and household essentials online at anytime and delivering the products to customers at their doorstep.
In 2016, Alibaba-backed shopping platform Lazada acquired RedMart. This year, RedMart announced that it will cease its operations from its own website and that it will move to Lazada’s platform from 15 March 2019.
One RedMart customer is lamenting the move that has made online grocery shopping a “terrible experience” for him. Sharing his complaints in a detailed post on Reddit, u/bitflag wrote:
“Redmart had a great web site. It was clean, elegant and intuitive and mostly bug free. But now they are forcing everyone to use Redmart through Lazada and it’s a terrible experience for me:
Lists seem weird and buggy. Adding stuff to them doesn’t always work, items on the list have show a button “add to list” which makes no sense, some products that I bought or added aren’t showing up in the list, etc. As this is likely the main way people order stuff on Redmart and it’s all broken.
… and then there’s the wishlist which seems to be a duplicated list system that works separately from Redmart’s lists. Clicking on the little heart on product adds it to the wishlist not to a list.
Accessing lists isn’t always straightforward (button is here on some pages but not others… it was always there on Redmart.com)
Adding products to an existing order doesn’t seem possible anymore
Sometimes I’m not getting a confirmation email (yes, I checked the spam folder)
You have to re-login every few hours. As I tend to add stuff through the day to my cart it means I have to keep logging in again and again…
Why do I have to select items in my cart to proceed through the checkout? This makes no sense, if its in the cart then I want to order it obviously
I have a voucher that says “0 use” but I can’t use because the cart claims it’s already been used (?)
No more $1 discount for certain delivery timeslots?
Finally, the Redmart site is currently still up and mostly functional, except for the cart that throws an error when adding product and tells you to use Lazada… this is again a pretty bad way of moving users to the new site, either disable the old site or make it fully functional.”
Another netizen, u/bomhagari wrote: “I hate: Having to login every time I use the site. Wtf, this is 2019. They had this figured out 20 years ago; How slow the site is by comparison;
“How you have to go to the cart to add your items a second time to get your price total and check out; How clunky the site design is in general.”
Reddit user u/Neptunera shared more complaints about the RedMart move but offered that “Now that the redmart items are on lazada, items may have more user reviews as compared to when on redmart.”
Another netizen, u/Varantain, seemed to dispute this view but noting that “Now that RedMart items are on Lazada, there’s no way to price match, say, a bottle of wine from different sellers, by filtering them out.”
Other netizens concurred with these complaints and criticised the new platform as cluttered and inconvenient, compared to the old RedMart website. Several netizens even said that their heavy groceries have been erroneously delivered to their offices instead of their homes:
It is unclear whether RedMart-Lazada will upgrade their web services. Late last month, RedMart said on Twitter that a lot of the key features on its original website will be back on Lazada by June.
Netizens, however, have asked why the Lazada move was rolled out when the features weren’t already prepared:
Earlier, another loyal customer publicly criticised RedMart for the partnership with Lazada and has asserted that the merger would result in the “loss of a supermarket game changer” that RedMart has been, thus far.
Facebook user Sara-Ann Shuen Krishnamoorthy had predicted well before the Lazada move took place that the move may be a loss to customers who flocked to RedMart due to its streamlined shopping process:
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