The mess that is sainsburys.co.uk

I shop weekly with Sainsbury’s. Specifically, I get a grocery delivery sent to home. But, I have to say, the experience is incredibly painful, due to how poor their website is. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a few things about it, giving details of what the frustration is. It will show bad UI, performance and bugs.

I’ll be using Google Chrome because the experience on Safari is even worse (performance-wise anyway – everything else is just the same).

Creating my next order

Sainsbury’s let you create orders many weeks in advance, so every week I go in and add another, as it’s made available (before the pandemic, I just had one for next week but, when Covid hit, found all the future ones fully booked – I now book as many out in advance as I can).

Issue 1 – What cookies?

This happens every week and has been occurring for years, so is something that Sainsbury’s have no wish to fix.

If I’ve been signed in recently (but not too recently), when I head to the website to create a new order, it signs me out. I then sign back in and get this screen…

Apparently, I don’t have cookies enabled (narrators voice: “he did”) and I get this every time (and whichever browser I use).

So, I click on “I’ve enabled cookies” and it doesn’t show again (well, until the next week).

Issue 2: Consistency in the UI

The next stage, once I’ve logged in, is to book a new online order. The problem is that Sainsbury’s keep moving the links around.

So, we’ve just gone through the above “please enable cookies” farce – where are we now? Well, once you’ve clicked “I’ve enabled cookies”, it takes you to the URL with a format of https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/TopCategoriesDisplay (with a few extra parameters thrown in the end). Basically, it’s a screen that shows off their top grocery categories. This is what it looks like with me logged in…

The option to book a delivery slot is a nondescript orange button in the sidebar, looking like an awful lot of content on the page. The primary options are those big icons near the top – Click & Collect, My orders, etc.

The question has to be – why does Click & Collect get a place there, but not a delivery?

Now, if you go to the main grocery page, it looks different. Compare and contrast the 2 screens, particularly those icons at the top…

That’s right, now “Book a Delivery” is there. Also inconsistent with their “Book a slot” wording in the sidebar too. Is it a delivery or slot? Both go to the same place.

Just to confuse things more, if you log into the site and don’t get the cookies notice, it takes you to a third URL, which has the same icon layout as the one on the left, above. In other words, after first logging in, you always get the screen without the delivery option, no matter which of the myriad of landing pages you end up on.

The conclusion has to be to just remember to use that button in the sidebar, which is the only thing consistent way. The movement and inconsistency of those top options, though, makes what they’re trying to achieve pointless.

Issue 3: Booking a slot

When you go to now book a lot for your delivery, again the UI fails. You can scroll down the page to see the various times available over the next week. There’s also a button that lets you advance to the next week. Sadly, scroll down and that latter button disappears off the screen. So, if you’re looking for a booking, you may end up scrolling down, scrolling up, moving on a week, etc. The headings don’t scroll and remained locked into place – so why not the week button as well?

Here’s a screenshot of the screen before scrolling and once you have…

I particularly like how their “feedback” button overlays onto a clickable part of the screen (sigh).

And when it comes to Christmas, they open up a separate section in advance for those. Sadly, I wasn’t able to capture screenshots this year of it, but let’s just say it’s a jumbling mess, which I got hopeless lost in.

Selecting a date and time has rarely been made more difficult.

Issue 4: Now what?

You’ve booked your slot and now you’ve got this screen…

Yes, you’re back to the grocery screen (with the handy “Book delivery” option now appearing, once you’ve done one and therefore the ONE TIME you don’t actually need it). All done, right? Log in and call it a day.

But read the text in the sidebar. You have 2 hours to reserve it. What? How? Well, that’s it – you just have to know. They could have sent you to a helpful screen at this point but, no, this is it.

You have to put items in your basket now until you get to a minimum value (not shown) and then checkout. All within the next 2 hours, or you loose the slot you booked.

Oh, and the sidebar is saying it will cost me £7 for delivery, despite me having one of their delivery passes which means that it’s free.

Issue 5: Favourites

Sainsbury’s lets you maintain a list of favourite items, making it easier (theoretically) to add regular items into your basket. But there are a few issues even with this basic idea.

They show favourite in multiple ways, some of which are hidden
The favourites screen lists all of the items one-by-one (see the screenshot in Issue 6) in a grid-like pattern. Except, some – some – are put in a horizontally scrolling list at the very top. Most of the items are off the screen so can’t be easily seen unless you remember to scroll through it. Right now, it lists this slider as “Winter Favourites”, whereas the main grid-list is “Your Regular Favourites”, despite many of those in the first group are also regular. Included in “Winter Favourites” is eggs, which regularly now get forgotten about because I haven’t noticed them hidden in this list.

What constitutes a favourite? Apparently, just buying an item once does. I bought some beef this week – the first time I’d bought this particular product. It’s now shown as a favourite. On the flip-side, you get a warning screen when trying to un-favourite an item and have to click a button to confirm it.

And do you know what a favourite definitely isn’t? Something that Sainsbury’s has been paid to add to your list. Sadly, they do this and you’ll find your otherwise helpful list of favourites peppered with products that you didn’t add.

Issue 6: Performance

Performance issues on the site is why I ended up moving doing my deliveries from Safari to Chrome. Both experience issues, but it’s far worse on Safari.

Basically, you scroll down the food lists, adding anything into your basket. All good, yes? Except, regularly you’ll get what I call “the spinner of doom”…

Can you see the spinner under some of the products where the “Add” button normally is? I’ve attempted to add these, one at a time, to my basket and it’s just stopped. Give it time.

But, what happens is that the longer you’re on a screen (in this case I’m going through my “Favourites” list and adding them on) the slower it gets until it stops. It becomes painful before it then attempts to rectify the issue. On Safari, it often refreshes the screen. On Chrome, well…

These issues are NOT occasional but EVERY GOD-DAMN TIME and probably the biggest frustration with the whole Sainsbury’s site.

Am I doing it at a busy period? If you suspect 7am on a Sunday is such a time, then yes. But I don’t think that’s the problem. It’s just a piss-poor quality site, with badly implemented Ajax (or equivalent).

Issue 7: I’m not going to show you all of that

It may be related to the aforementioned performance issues but, sometimes, when viewing products, the fixed part of the page header disappears. This includes the menu and the search option, so when this happens it makes navigation impossible.

Refreshing the existing page normally bring it back, but it’s another example of something badly though out – even when you have a fixed navigation like this, you need some kind of backup in case of issues. They’ve implemented it so that it remains on screen even when you scroll down, but a backup of one at the very top in case their whizzy solution crashes would help here.

I’ve not seen this issue for a little while (hence the lack of a screenshot), so maybe they’ve fixed it (or maybe it was mainly prevalent on Safari, which I’m no longer using for this site).

Issue 8: Checking out

We’ve created an order and filled our basket. The site has crashed a couple of times but we’re there. Checking out should be easy.

But first, Sainsbury’s wants to throw a few screens at you. 4 to be precise.

1. “Before you go” – a big list of items you haven’t bought but they’d like to recommend to you. I’ve never added anything from this list.
2. “Forgot your favourites?” – they’ll show some of the favourites that you haven’t added. You probably missed them because of how badly presented they are.
3. “Checkout” – you can finally pay. If you’re amending an existing order then you’ve already provided payment details. Why do you have to go through confirming all this again?
4. “We’ve got your order”

I understand they want that first one there to try and push additional products, but to have this as part of many screen is still. Two horizontal sliders with recommendations and missed favourite all on one screen, followed by check-out options would put all the same information in front of the customer but with less clicks.

As it is, with their performance issues, splitting all of this across multiple pages makes the whole thing even more painful.

In conclusion

Sainsbury’s need to do a number of things here, which I’ll present in order of where I see the priority needs to be…

1. Resolve their performance issues when adding items to the basket. Pages slowing down and crashing should not occur.
2. Make the slot booking process consistent, with those large icons being the same which landing page you use
3. Buying something once does not make it a “favourite”. If you’re going to automate the process (customers can already add a favourite manually), make it customer-definable (e.g. something in settings where you can say how many times you have to buy it before it becomes that)
4. Add instructions for what to do once you book a slot
5. Simplify the check-out process
6. Get rid of the multiple ways to display favourites, so it’s harder to miss things. Consistency is key here. Again.

Update , 20th April 2025

As I mentioned above, I hate the fact that they throw “Sponsored” products into your list of favourites. I have a massive tub of Flora in the fridge as a result of accidentally clicking on in in my favourites (it wasn’t one) and then not realising, at time of delivery, we hadn’t ordered it as my wife wasn’t around to verify.

However, they’ve ratcheted this up a notch and now deem it acceptable to now show you a range of “Spring favourites”, all marked as one of your favourites (unlike the sponsored items which are shown alongside, but never marked with that “heart” icon), and none of them being products I’ve bought, let alone marked as a favourite.

This is a new level of devious, under-handed selling tactics that is totally unacceptable. Shame on Sainsbury’s.

Update, 11th May 2025

Since yesterday it’s not been letting me log in – it just comes up with a page to say “Something went wrong” and tells me to try again. But the same thing occurs.

Yesterday I deleted all the data (cookies, etc.) for Sainsbury’s and that didn’t cure it.

Today, it’s doing the same thing so I also tried deleting data for Nectar too. Now I’m in.