Another winge on our increasingly online lives: Convenience is a two-way street. Just as it is easy to shop online, it’s also easy for those same online shops to repeatedly blast you with marketing information and surveys. These campaigns are automated, fire and forget by these e-businesses. And they are incredibly low cost. I assume they get an acceptable feedback or click-through rate to keep doing it. Maybe they don’t measure response rates. They certainly don’t measure annoyance rates.
I do most of my supermarket shopping online here in Singapore. It is mostly painless. I average two deliveries a week. I am in close walking distance to a Sheng Siong and an Ang Mo Supermarket, and there’s a Cold Storage and a Fairprice at malls at my nearest MRT and Bus Interchange – which is two bus stops away on busses that regularly pass by my apartment. I am definitely not isolated from supermarkets, nor am I in a food desert. I used to use Amazon Fresh, but they have withdrawn from the Singapore market.
Every couple of months, I get asked for feedback on a recent delivery from my online supermarket. I dutifully completed the questionnaire the first couple of times, spelt out my issues or problems, and the supplier quickly and dutifully ignored me. No feedback, no follow-up. So I gave up.
It may be important to them (as they keep telling me in survey requests and follow ups), but it is just not important (enough) for me.