Amazon Fresh isn’t living up to its namesake by some unhappy customers. While the digital grocery delivery platform has long billed itself as an easy and efficient way of getting your favorite kitchen and pantry necessities to your door, Amazon Fresh is now being plagued by complaints of low-quality or rotten produce, incorrect orders, canceled or delayed deliveries, and frequently missing items. In essence, it seems that Amazon Fresh is being seen as more trouble than it’s worth.
In the last year or so, Amazon Fresh saw a number of changes, including the acquisition and delivery of Whole Foods products, which was initially heralded as a game-changer in grocery delivery. But it seems that with those changes came quite a bit of chaos, and a number of customers told Business Insider that they were getting sub-par service in major markets including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. These complaints are also showing up on Amazon’s own pages — if you check out the reviews for Amazon Fresh, you will see that it has only a 3.3-star rating out of 5, with more than 800 reviews. According to the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings, which ranks customer experiences, Amazon Fresh is now in last place when it comes to grocers with a score of 67 percent. This is 13 points lower than last year.
“As they’ve scaled up, they seem to be making the rookie mistakes,” Ryan Fritzsche, a Fresh customer from Brooklyn since 2014 told Business Insider. “You expect them to be improving instead of [deteriorating].”
Heather Fishel, a Los Angeles resident, agreed with this assessment, noting, “Every single time I get groceries delivered from Fresh, something is damaged. Most of the time, it’s all of the order.”
This could be bad news for Amazon Fresh, especially seeing as most dissatisfied customers are apparently leaving the service altogether. After all, with so many competitors eager to fill the hole that Amazon Fresh has left, the service can’t really afford to be making these sorts of mistakes. Although Amazon customer service seems to be extremely kind when it comes to customer complaints — offering refunds or credits toward a future order — users still note that not having groceries when expected can be a major inconvenience.
“I just bought groceries from you because I need groceries,” Fritzsche said. “I can’t eat a refund.”
Of course, Amazon likely has a plan to resolve some of these concerns, and it may come in the form of eliminating Amazon Fresh in favor of Amazon Prime Now. After all, the online retailer is already looking to fold Whole Foods into Prime Now in several U.S. cities, delivering straight from stores rather than fulfillment centers.
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