Background information - I have been working in IT for 30 years, I am using a fast laptop, my NBN connection speed is close to 100. I have contacted both stores on these issues multiple times and have been given false excuses and instructions from their Support people. My shopping list on both sites contains hundreds of items which may be stressing the new interfaces but they had no issues on the old sites. I have access to Coles’ old site for comparison purposes. This also means I have more issues with Wooworths because I am forced to use the new/ site
COLES
Stored lists
The major issue is the processing of stored shopping lists. The new site deleted my existing shopping list and I had to spend hours recreating it. My shopping list in the old site took one minute to load. In the new site it now takes ten minutes. In the old site, there were several sorting options, the one I used most is to sort by ‘Specials’ so that they list first. In the new site, the list is automatically sorted by ‘Most recent’ and there are no other options available. There is no A-Z sort so you cannot locate individual items. If you did not know the default sort option and you selected ‘Most recent’ sorting, it still takes ten minutes and then it lists 50% of the items as ‘Unavailable’ when a check of the old site shows they are available. Interestingly when I finally get the list to load, the new site says some products are unavailable whereas, in the same store, the old site says they are available. This would indicate that there are other issues with the new interface as the data in the background database must be the same.
On the Mobile app this list is unable to run at all, as it cannot find the price or aisle details.
Sorting results of search
Product lists that are the result of a search are missing an A-Z option for sorting in the new version. It did exist in the old version., Woolworths does provide this option.
Tick on product to show it is already in your saved lists.
Loved this new feature, no equivalent in Woolworths.
WOOLWORTHS
This list excludes new features that work well. General comment - too much white space requiring excessive scrolling and paging.
Drilling down in stored lists
As I don’t have access to the old site I am having to rely on my memory. As I am working through a stored list I need to drill down on a product on page five to get more information, it works but when I return to the list, it takes me back to the top of page one, irrespective of where I was before drilling down.
I have to remember that I was on page five. This is NOT how it should work; it did not do this in the past, but it does now. It is most frustrating. Coles site behaves correctly.
Unlike Coles, there is an option to show only specials in stored lists but there is no A-Z sorting to enable you to locate specific items in the stored list.
Showing the results of a search
Initially all the products including the Marketplace are displayed. Example - Search for “keto”. 41 products are displayed including Marketplace. The ‘All products’ in the left menu says 33, .When I select ‘All products’, it displays 41 including Marketplace. In the menu, ‘Specials’ shows as 10 and when selected 10 are displayed. So the issue seems to be inaccurate counts showing against ‘All Products’ in the menu. Including Marketplace in the results of a search is most annoying as the Woolworths item may be at the bottom of the list and if you have no interest in Marketplace items there is no obvious way to remove them.
The ‘In Stock’ slider shows me 15 products, so it appears to be a way of removing the Marketplace products - who knew? How about changing its name to ‘Remove Marketplace’
Shopping from stored lists
There is now a white space problem caused by a large area at the bottom of every screen allowing you to add all 36 items to the cart. It is much too large and as a result, some of the listed items are missing data such as the size in grams. They obviously have a limited number of characters available which is inadequate and it is also exacerbated by the amount of white spaces between items. So you drill down to get the full details of an item and come up against the problem mentioned earlier, drilling down in a list loses your starting position in the list.
A related issue, The page header says (36 items) but I have hundreds in my list. The heading should say ‘36 items per page’ to avoid confusion. Why tell me about the number of items per page unless an option to change it is provided. Annoying design feature, not an error.
‘Browse products’ in the top menu
This produces a menu at left of screen with 4 large graphics under ‘Popular and suggested’ at the top of the list and the menu is excessively long because of the mini pictures for Categories that serve no useful purpose and require more scrolling. Annoying design feature, not an error. Coles also has the little pictures next to categories resulting in more scrolling.
Number of items to be ordered is prefilled
Scrolling through my stored list I noticed many products are prefilled with a number of items to be ordered. Most say 1, which makes sense, but some say 2, 3 or more. I think this might cause the user to incorrectly order the number prefilled instead of reverting it to 1.
‘Out of stock’ issue
There is no way to differentiate, in saved lists, between ‘Out of stock’ and 'No longer sold’ . So stored lists keep growing over time. We need help to clean them.
