Honestbee, a new delivery service in Bangkok, promises to bring products from a handful of retailers to your door in about an hour.
Though they deliver from retailers that include Wishbeer and several places we weren’t familiar with, the one that really excited us was delivery from Villa Market. Even though it sometimes feels like lugging bags home from Villa is the only exercise we get, we’d still happily trade it in for an extra half-hour on the sofa or in the pool.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
We jumped on the Honestbee site and were happy to find it easy to use. We tried to order some specific and obscure products that we usually visit Villa specifically to buy. They included: 10 frozen vegetarian burritos, a particular cheese, a favorite salad mix, a particular salsa and two cases of bottled water.
You can also order booze from the Villa delivery service, which would be great for parties.
Payment can be made by cash or credit card. The delivery fee is THB60 for orders below THB590 and free for orders above that amount. There is a flat THB30 “concierge fee” for someone to handpick your items. You can choose delivery between 10am and 10pm daily.
ORDER PLACEMENT
Our order came to about THB900. When we tried to place it on Saturday at 11am, the site said that the earliest delivery would be between 1 and 2pm. Ok, that’s 2-3 hours, not one, and since we weren’t planning on being home that long, we waited and placed the order on Sunday at 12:30pm. We got an approximate delivery time of 2-3pm. That’s still more than the one hour promised but we had no plans to go out, so we placed the order.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Ten minutes later, the phone rang and a girl that spoke English fairly well informed us that they only had three burritos in stock and asked if that was okay. We said it was fine. The order arrived at 1:55pm in a large yellow, reusable Honestbee tote that we got to keep.
Our order was correct. The frozen items were still frozen.
RATING THE SERVICE
The next time we logged into the site, it asked us to rate our shopper and driver, with a very similar-looking interface to Uber. It also remembered our past order so, if you consistently buy the same products, it’s pretty easy.
FINAL THOUGHTS
We were impressed that the order was correct, that the staff spoke English and that they gave honest estimates for delivery times — and even delivered a few minutes early. We also appreciated that the items are the same price that they are in the store and that, by ordering more, you can bypass a delivery fee.
We imagine that Honestbee will be getting more business from us.
Until April 16, they are offering THB200 off of orders of THB890 and above with the promo code BEEKK. We used this, it worked. We were happy*
*FREE CHEESE!
Reader Interactions