A WalmartLabs’s subscription e-commerce business, Goodies.co, will be closing down. What’s behind the demise of Goodies and the monthly snack boxes it mails out to subscribers? A sampling of the comments on the Goodies Facebook page suggests that there were some fundamental problems with the service.
Among the issues: Some subscribers weren’t receiving boxes they paid for. Goodies apparently has a canned “angry customer” Facebook response (“We’re always here to chat if you have feedback or questions about your Goodies Co. experience. Just send us an email at customercare@goodies.co!”), but the actual follow-up on complaints was apparently lacking. One customer said the email address didn’t work, while another emailed multiple times but got no reply:
Some subscribers got their boxes really late, and when they did show up, the contents of the box were either “crap” or “a disappointment,” depending on who you ask. (Also: Tomato-mint tea?! BLECH.)
You can see plenty more comments from frustrated Goodies subscribers on Facebook, but in short, it looks like Goodies is a victim of its own highly underwhelming customer service and weak product assortment.
And it’s striking that problems with online order fulfillment seemed to be such a big issue, since Walmart needs to make advances in exactly this area if it is to step up its e-commerce game. The fact that a WalmartLabs initiative is failing—and failing on such basic aspects of e-commerce like following up with customer emails—doesn’t do much to instill confidence in Walmart’s ability to overcome its broader e-commerce challenges.