Farewell Shipt

Last week, I quit Shipt.

In the end, what did it in were the same order accuracy issues that plagued my tests of Google Shopping Express and Instacart circa 2016. Amazon Prime Now circa 2016 did not have this problem, although their inventory range was challengingly limited.

I strongly believe that one-off shoppers as an overall labor force will never achieve a high level of accuracy. Some are really good; the bad ones make for (in my case) no peanut butter and jelly for my kiddo’s lunch.

In the future, I won’t use any delivery service that isn’t using a dedicated order picker (i.e., who really knows the store or stockroom).

I try to write the companies I quit to leave them with constructive feedback. Here’s my letter to Shipt and their response back.

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Hi folks,

After having experienced Shipt seven times, I would like to cancel my membership and ask for a refund. Fortunately, I have not given my gift membership yet.

Here is my feedback for my ‘exit interview,’ so to speak:

My main reason for quitting is that the quality of your service varies too much from time to time.

Most people who are working as your shoppers are not familiar enough with the store in order to be able to locate the products I order. It’s simply not believable that commonly available items (such as the peanut butter and the strawberry jam that I ordered but did not receive today) are out of stock. It’s far more likely that the shopper could not locate it within the store.

In one instance, a shopper told me that something I ordered wasn’t available, and took a picture of the alternatives available to me. When I pointed out that in the picture was the item that I actually ordered, the fellow sheepishly agreed and brought the right item.

Only one shopper (name withheld) was someone I would use again. She was stellar — she even checked for expiration dates, and only brought items that would not go bad quickly. I would pay for her separately, rather than rolling the dice and getting whomever picked up the gig.

All in all, the intermittent time and attention I have to spend responding to people who are running around looking for the items I ordered, and not finding them, negates the time that I could just go to the store myself.

I am assuming that it isn’t possible to have my orders route only to (name), which is too bad because I would stay your customer if that were possible. For me, order accuracy is the most important attribute by a wide margin. If you could guarantee that my order would be right, and that only the truly out of stock items would be omitted, I wouldn’t even care what time the order arrived.

Thanks for listening, and for timely processing my cancellation and refund.

Best wishes,

(signed)

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Four hours later the reply came. Kudos to Shipt on their reply time!

We value you as a member, and we’re sorry to see you go! We have cancelled your membership as you requested, and we appreciate you giving Shipt a try. Your refund will take a few business days to process back to your account. We would love to hear any feedback you have about our service. If you have a few moments, please take this brief survey: (link omitted)

If you would like to join Shipt in the future, log back into your account via shipt.com/shop or on the app and click ‘Get Started’ to select a new membership plan. We would love to shop for you in the future should your needs change!

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While I did quit Shipt, I appreciate their friendly sendoff. They also processed my refund (prorated) quickly. If they ever change their model to have a vastly improved order picking quality, I’m glad to try them again.

5/5 star exchange. Good luck team!