Basically, this app is a notification spam machine. Below is a screenshot of notifications born from 1 ride I took. Let’s analyse them starting from the first one at the bottom.
Grab Notification Spam
The first notification is about the money being on hold. Really why would I care?
The second notification is about the driver being nearby. Sure, this is useful, but ideally, it should be withdrawn once the trip starts. Apps have the capability to withdraw notifications in iOS.
The third one is undeniably spam.
Oka, the fourth one is about money being charged and useful.
The fifth one is also spam. I don’t want to know with each ride how many points I earned. If I want to know, I can check the app.
Speaking of the app, there’s a notifications section in it, which is 100% spam.
Grab sucks balls
Unfortunately, unlike the other services, there’s no way to stay in Thailand and not use Grab. You need it to order food , order stuff from different stores (Okay, you can use FoodPanda for these 2 things, too) and get around. There’s no ride hailing company in Thailand that even comes close to Grab.
Just debating whether to turn off notifications altogether from the app.
Lazada sucks balls even worse than Flipkart does. It is one of the reasons I miss Amazon so much.
Lazada is one of the leading eTailers in Thailand and in South-East Asia. There are other options here, too, like Shopee, but they suck balls just as hard. Shopee doesn’t even have an app for app store regions set outside Thailand so I don’t use it at all. But in this post, let’s look at Lazada.
As soon as you open the app, you are greeted with a fullscreen advertisement that you can’t dismiss immediately.
Greeted with a Fullscreen Ad
Once you get past the obnoxious advertisement, you go to the main screen of the app. Notice how 70% of the interface is actually just ads?
Interface full of Advertisements
Not only is the interface full of advertisements, everything uses bright, garish colours. Its as if the designers targeted the app at school kids. Lazada sucks so hard, the interface is also full of useless notifications at the bottom.
Once you try to order something, you cannot see the estimated delivery date on the item page. You need to add the item to cart and make it all the way to the checkout page before you can see when it can be delivered.
Even when you get through all the cringe and actually order something from these bastards, your ordeal is not over. You sit and wonder why the item you order has not shipped yet. It is because once you order the item and even pay for it, you still have to sort through hundreds of messages in the spam section, find a message like below and “confirm” your order. When I paid money for the item, was it not confirmation enough for you pricks?
Have to confirm, lol
Once the item ships, you have to manually check the status to see where it has reached. This is because as soon as you install the app, you have to turn off all notifications from it, lest the spam notifications take over your life.
All the spam notifications lead to the “messages” section of the app. The app clearly has an identity crisis and cannot decide whether it wants to be a shopping app or a messenger.
Bullshit messages
Spam
Messages, LoL
The “messages” section is a quagmire of spam, as expected.
If they are using any AI/ML/targeting for the spam that the app is full of, I can’t see it, because nothing here is relevant to me or remotely close to what I would ever want to buy.
I wonder why these eTailers think it is OK to bombard someone with spam so aggressively when they are already trying to spend their money on your platform to buy something. I can’t wait to go back to India and start using Amazon again.
