Starship - Food Delivery

The service broke, came back so I ordered but went back down. My food arrived at a time I could not pick it up so they cancelled my order (since I didn’t pick it up). It wouldn’t automatically refund so I contacted customer support and they quickly got back to me through their chat service. I was able to get a refund and the customer support person was so nice! Definitely improved my experience of the app. Food quality is usually fine and more based on whoever packed your order (items being forgotten, spills) than the Starships themselves. I’ve definitely had things spill but it’s almost always been from someone at the store not putting a sticker over the opening of something. And I’ve been autorefunded for missing items immediately before. Overall really good!

This service works to the standard it should work once in every ten orders, and those few times are what has led me to believe that the service may become more consistent, and at that point truly satisfactory. However, it is truly ridiculous as your order can be loaded into the robot and then not leave for your destination for up to two hours, leading to what should have been a convenient pickup now causing you to miss the important thing that caused you not to be able to leave in the first place. Furthermore, customer support is absolutely useless as they only go so far as to confirm your order arrived and will not address anything beyond that. If you are building an app around a service, that service should at the very least be performed properly and consistently. However, in the case of starship, it most certainly is not. Edit: Not only is the wait time inaccurate with poor customer service but it will also randomly remove items from your order and will not notify you until the rest of the order has been processed, at which point it is too late to fix the order.

So, first off, this is a very interesting, cost effective way to grab a few things you need last minute, without having to go out to the grocery store! That’s the “love” part. Now for the “hate” part. You select all of the items that you really need, and they charge you for ALL of those items, and let you know the progress. Still great! THEN, inevitably, they send you a message 20 minutes later saying that they do not have either ALL, or part of your order. UGH! In this day and age, I get that, but you would think that there would be a way for the app to sync up with the inventory. Especially since they charge you up front, then take 3-5 days to adjust the order amount. Not to mention the disappointment of having to go get the items you needed anyway. So what was the point? If you don’t have what I need, understandable, just don’t allow me to order it and don’t charge me for it. So all in all, IF, you can get what you actually ordered, it’s awesome!