Product Review | BigBasket.com | Website Review

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Pic courtesy: http://bigbasket.com/

Ahh finally I’m back from my amazing vacation at Goa, India. Physically I came back around 6 days ago but it took me 6 long days to shake my head off the vacation mood and return to reality. This trip was a result of few minutes of planning; hence everything was decided on the road only. But it was a hell of a trip! After all, the combo of Sun, Beach and Sea can’t go wrong, right? Until and unless you are imprisoned, sigh! Hell, I’m getting carried away with the waves again! I’ll share stories from my trip later but for now back to reality check!

The real jeopardy of life just started when we reached back home around 9 pm with lighter mood and realized we hadn’t left anything to eat back here and the situation was a complete mess. We dint even have eggs or breads and it was a Sunday; so there were not a slightest chance of having any shop open for our essential supplies. Then I remembered of BigBasket.com, the online super market. Haven’t you heard of it yet? It is the one stop solution for your daily needs. As of now their service is available in mumbai, pune, bangalore and Hyderabad but I hope soon they will spread their wings in more cities. Have you ever thought that you could even shop groceries from an online portals? Now since we have one let’s get benefited from it.

The Website:

The BigBasket.com website is very well-designed with user friendly environment. It has loads of specification which will keep you engaged and your grocery shopping will not be hectic any more. Take a look at few of their qualities.

Pros:

ü Feel Good factor: The home page specifies all the categories and sub categories very clearly. Once you enter the site you will just know where to look for your things.

ü Deals/Promos: The home page always flashes the ongoing offers, discounts or deals which actually help to get the best out of shopping financially. By the way they always have some promos going on. So don’t forget to keep an eye on them.

ü Quick Access: All products are well tagged and categorized under specific order. Like, fruits & vegetable, grocery & staples, bread, diary & eggs, beverages, branded food, personal care, household, imported gourmet and meat. Of if you don’t know where to start you can directly hit the ‘View Complete Shop’ button. How convenient it is!

ü Well defined Categories: Under each category you will find several sub categories which will help you to land of your desired product pretty quickly. You can sort out the products of your choice by the ‘brand name’. It is the best feature I’ve found for a brand oriented person like me.

ü Easy navigation: Adding products to the cart is very simple and easy to proceed with.

ü Scratch list: They provide a Scratch List in the website which is nothing but your hand written grocery list or a text file on your mobile/tab containing the same.

ü Search Box: Searching in the website is quite quick and real time. Products will start appearing right on search dialogue box while you keep typing which is a very good feature for me. I just need to select the product from there and can save a lot of time without going through the entire category.

ü No Ad: Thanks to the BigBasket that they’ve kept the website advertisement free. Otherwise it would be very annoying Online Supermarket experience.

Cons:

Product names: Please provide the proper English names of each product. I’ve found many products specially, under Grocery & Staples with names in regional terms. It makes it difficult to find a product if someone has no idea about those local names.
Search Box: The very same above mentioned reason goes with the search box too. Most of us use English names to search for a product and end up with ‘no result is found’. But if you go and search that particular product on specific category you will find it right on place but with a different name. This is very annoying while shopping.
Exclude Out of Stock: Now this little feature had just took me down. In each and every page and with every fresh search I have to keep an eye on the checkbox of ‘Exclude Out of Stock’. It’s a request as a customer that please keep the box checked throughout one session, if it is checked once.
Scratch list: The scratch list is for making our lives less complex then again we are not allowed to edit the list. Why? Why? Why? Let us customize our own scratch list.

Products:

Pros:

ü Widest Product Range: The product range BigBasket is offering is incredible under one website.

ü Fresh Vegetables & Fruits: They’ve stocked up a large variety of fresh vegetables and fruits. All the seasonal items are included on the website and most of them are actually available for delivery. The vegetables and fruits are very fresh and clean. Even leaves and greens are neatly cleaned and trimmed. At the same time price is just similar to market which seems a fair deal to me.

ü Household: The first thing which wooed me is the variety in Household category. They have from cookware to serveware; kitchen appliances to utensil cleaners; car care to pet care; stationaries to toiletries and still counting. One thing I must mention that they have those ceramic pans which was in my shopping list for a long time and I’ve searched them from local stores to shopping malls with complete failure. Now I’ll be a proud owner of those beauties.

ü Personal Care: then there is a second woo factor too; personal care. They have fashion accessories to personal hygiene; body care to hair care; cosmetics to skin care; and the varieties in products are like enormous. It feels like they’ve stocked up the entire shopping mall under a single domain.

ü Chicken & Fish: The collection of chicken is another mentionable thing. They have plenty of variations of simple chicken to keep a nation happy. Variety of fish is not so good but I’m mentioning it here just because of those beautiful sardine. Can’t take my eyes off them!

Cons:

Lack of Naming: If you are a brand oriented person then you won’t be very happy with body care. They don’t have any kind of scrubs and more over scrubbers are described as scrub.
Meat & Seafood: The meat and seafood section is honestly very disappointing. There are no pork items whereas they’ve mentioned it in the category. Same sad scene can be seen in seafood section too. Only one or two fish items are available with one prawn option. There are no other sea foods like calamari, squids or crabs.

Service:

The BigBasket is definitely providing some premium quality service though it is not error free. Let’s talk about the positive things first.

Pros:

ü Multiple Time slots for Delivery: As it is an One stop Solution to your grocery shopping the service of the home delivery should be satisfying. Surprisingly, BigBasket has managed to keep four time slots for home delivery of their products. i.e. 9.30am – 12 pm, 5 pm – 7.30 pm, 7.30 pm – 10 pm and on next day morning 7 am – 9.30 am which are very much convenient to fit in customer’s need. They also claim to deliver on the same day of order.

ü Cash on Delivery Payment: They provide easy payment methods including Cash on Delivery. Again it is a very important step for vegetables or fruits shopping where you may actually find one or two items missing or almost on the rotten edge. Check your items and pay; that’s it!

ü Notifications via Email & Sms: one of the irritating thing about home delivery is you have to stay at home until your product is delivered; no matter how important work you have in your hands. Gladly, BigBasket sends you notifications via email and sms right from the beginning of your shopping, billing to arrival of the products. So you can keep a tab on your jobs and your grocery delivery.

ü Notification on Price Change via Email: They also notify you with your updated invoice about the price of your veggies if there are any changes due to the weight. Say, you ordered one iceberg lettuce weighted 300g but they are sending you one with 400g. so you will get an email with your updated invoice including new price.

Cons:

Price is not mentioned in sms: As I mentioned before they always notify you via email and sms but one thing I found very annoying that is they don’t mention the amount of the invoice in sms if you are about to pay with cash. It’s certainly not convenient to open the mail and check the amount before arrival of the products.
Few items are missed: The other disturbing thing is you can’t be sure that you will get all the products you’ve ordered. They will leave out one or two items either accidently or due to unavailability. And here the excitement of online grocery shopping evaporates all of a sudden. For instance, I’ve ordered All Out refill, pack of three and I received one single piece.
Usage of plastic: This point may not seem valid to many of you but it concerns me so I’m including it. I just wish if they could use paper bags instead of those plastic trays for the sake of environment.