Chances are there wasn't collaboration, communication, and checkpoints, there wasn't a process agreed upon or specified with the granularity required. It's the grocery shopping experience gone awry right from the start. Forswearing the use of empty promises wouldn't have helped, and won't help now. It's like saying you're a bad shopper, use fewer coupons, don't buy everything in bulk. True enough, but that's not all that it takes to get your grocery shopping back on track.

The grocery enthusiasts are out there with a vengeance to get that perfect order

You made all the required shopping lists for the ordered items, got all the approvals, set up a user-friendly interface or had them built, you decided on a delivery system, got a license for it or adapted:

• The products you may choose when you forgot to stock up on essentials, the special offers you might catch to impress your pantry is your business.
• But what about your daily groceries? Cart layouts, item lists, categories—will your customers accept that you go about shopping the easy way?
• Experts in the grocery business will tell you in no uncertain terms that a disorganized website is a huge, huge no-no to forswear forever.
• Not so fast, I'd say, there are some redeeming factors in favor of offering an intuitive experience, as the site’s use is merely the symptom of a worse problem to take into consideration.
• Websites for grocery shopping use powerful, adaptable platforms.
• E-commerce platforms and content management systems ensure that you can show a variety of products, offers, and inventory using the same system.
• When it's about controlling hundreds of product pages, order histories for loyal customers, or delivery profiles, things can break, designs agreed upon can have unintended consequences and look much different than expected.

This is quite a problem to solve, but just abandoning empty promises won't fix it. Using actual product images and descriptions in designs will help, but there's no guarantee that every oddity will be found and corrected. Do you want to be sure? Then a prototype or live beta site with real product data is needed—but you’re not going that far until you go through an initial design cycle.