Here’s another Mom Hack tip coming to you to make your life easier! Today, we’re talking about ordering your groceries online. Primarily, we’ll focus on Jet.com because realistically, I live in a very small town and most food ordering services are not available here. But I can tell you plenty about my experience with Jet.com, as well as others that have used it as well.
What is Jet.com and How Does It Work?
Jet.com is a website used to shop online. It includes anything and everything from groceries to electronics to personal hygiene products, etc. I have only ever used it for groceries, but they offer a ton of other products as well. Their concept is that the more you buy, the more you save. In other words, as you add items to your shopping cart, the price of most of the other items in your cart will drop, therefore saving you money.
How Do You Use It?
It’s very easy to set up a Jet.com account. Just click one of the links in this post and click the “Register” button in the top right corner of the page. Follow the prompts to set up your account. It’s that easy! From there, you can search for products by category, or by typing it in the search bar. Once you find an item you want to purchase, simply click “Add to Cart” and your shopping cart will begin to accumulate.
Pay special attention when you’re adding items to see what their delivery estimate is and whether they are “Cold Packed.” We’ll talk about these in a moment.
How Long Does It Take to Get Your Products?
This is where you want to pay attention to the shipping cues that each product gives you as you put it in your cart. Most products will say “2 Day Delivery” but it all depends on when you place your order. If you order Monday through Thursday before 3pm, you will likely get your items within 2 days. If, however, you order on the weekend or after 3pm on Thursday, your order probably won’t ship until the following Monday. I learned this the hard way when I placed my first order and found myself running to the store for essentials while I waited for my shipment to arrive.
Others I’ve known that have used Jet.com have received their items in just one day, especially the cold-packed items, but they were ordered during the week, before 3pm. I placed my first order on a Thursday night, hoping to get it by Saturday, but I hadn’t known about the ordering deadline and did not receive my shipment until the following Tuesday.
How Much Does It Cost?
This is where Jet.com can really save you money. The costs per item are relatively competitive with your local grocery store, and even some of the higher priced items will be by the time you finish your order because the price will drop with other added items. A hidden benefit that saved us money we hadn’t really planned on saving, was reducing impulse buying. Have you ever heard the advice to not go grocery shopping when you’re hungry? That’s because when you’re hungry, you are much more likely to make impulse buys, or to purchase things you weren’t planning on buying, just because you are hungry and it looked good. Shopping online period eliminates this because you are searching out the items you want to buy, instead of being persuaded by other products and promotions you pass by.
Jet also includes an offer for every order, that if you spend more than $35 on your order, the shipping will be free. And whoever spends less than $35 on your weekly groceries for your family is my hero, but it’s worth it get free shipping. Otherwise, there is a flat shipping fee for orders under $35 of $5.99. There is also an additional “Cold Packed” fee that I mentioned earlier that is applied to products that have to be kept cold with dry ice. They package these products separate from the rest of your order for that reason but the amount of cold products you order doesn’t change the cold packed fee. Otherwise, the cost is solely determined by the products you order and the quantity of items you get. For example, if you order 3 gallons of milk instead of 1, the price will drop.
Last but not least, always check the Promotions section to see if there is a coupon for something you can use. These change all the time, so it’s good to check before shopping to see if there’s any additional savings.
Tips and Tricks When Ordering with Jet.com
We’ve already talked about some of the ways to save extra money with Jet and they are built right into their ordering system, like ordering more than one of each product at a time and ordering more than $35 to get free shipping. There is a separate promotion going on with Jet with the promotion code SPRING15. When you enter that code exactly when checking out, you will receive 15% off your first 3 orders as a new customer until September 2017. There are other stimulations that apply, but you can read more about it on their website. There’s another trick you can do to get extra money back from buying products on Jet and that’s Ebates.
Ebates is a separate website that you can sign up for just as easily as Jet.com with no added cost. The idea behind Ebates is that you get money back from shopping through their website, even if you’re buying products from a ton of other sites. All you have to do is log in to the Ebates website, or use the easy cash back button, and then select the online store you want to shop from and shop as you normally would. Certain companies pay Ebates to essentially promote their websites and will set a percentage of what you spend that you can make back on your purchases. The best thing of all is that it includes Jet.com. Therefore, you can use both Ebates and Jet.com to get money back and save money from purchasing your groceries that you were already going to have to buy anyway. How great is that?
Use my Ebates code: https://www.ebates.com/r/RGRAHA168?eeid=28187 to easily get started saving money today!
Is It Really Worth It?
Some of you may still be skeptical about whether it’s really worth it to even order your groceries online, and I would argue that it is. There are a few set backs with ordering groceries online that I’m not a fan of, like having to plan ahead so that you get your order when you need it, but there are so many pros that it far outweighs the cons.
One person I know that uses Jet said she starts to make her grocery list at the beginning of the week for the following week. After all, she knows the products her family regularly buys and plans out her meals ahead of time. As the week goes on, and she runs out of various items, she just adds them to her list and orders it Thursday afternoon before 3pm. That way, she gets her items by Saturday and she can include all of those things that you can’t run back to the other aisle for because you forgot it on your first trip around. Yes, this does take extra planning, but again, it’s so worth it!
The customer service with Jet is honestly one of the best in companies I’ve worked with. When you’re shipping groceries, you do have to keep in mind that you’re receiving perishable items. In my first order, I had ordered 2 bunches of bananas and a 5 lb. bag of potatoes. Both came cold-packed, but my potatoes were on top of my bananas, meaning that by the time they reached me, they were bruised beyond consumption. I wrote an email to the customer service team, letting them know what had happened and sent a picture of my battered bananas. Within 24 hours, they responded apologizing for the packaging, reimbursed my account for the bananas and credited me an additional $5.99 that would cover either the shipping cost if my next order was under $35 or the cold-packed fee, just for the inconvenience. I have talked to others who have had a few things go awry for them as well and they were always reimbursed plus more.
I will also say that most of the time, their products are packaged well. My order sat out on my front porch until I got home from work and my frozen shrimp stayed frozen solid, my refrigerated items were cold and my shelf-stable products were not dinged or dented. They also package everything separately, which is great, because if you order soup or something liquid and it leaks, only that product is affected and you don’t have a huge mess to clean up when you’re unpacking your groceries.
For even easier ordering, Jet does have an app that easily allows you to order products and build your list over the course of the week. There is a very quick customer service section on the app as well that allows you to email them directly from your phone.
I continue to use Jet.com on and off depending on how quickly I can get an order together and how fast I need the products I’m ordering, but I will definitely be using it on my next maternity leave. Hello not having to take two babies to Walmart every week! That, in and of itself, is worth it to me!
Disclaimer…This post contains affiliates, which means that I may be compensated for references that come from this post, but rest assured I would never recommend any product or service that I don’t use and love myself. This post also contains my views and opinions and does not reflect the views of the companies discussed within.