Food Delivery in Quarantine: The Devil is in the Details

Being confined to our small apartment in Seoul has presented a number of challenges. Not surprisingly, our primary concern before arriving was making sure we would have enough food to eat. Thus, before we arrived, we had done some online research and had a plan in place. Our Airbnb host Han kindly offered to stock our kitchen with some essentials to get us through the first couple of days. We also planned to use the Shuttle app (similar to GrubHub) for delivery from area restaurants and Gmarket.com for groceries.

Upon our arrival at the apartment we found that Han indeed left us the staples that we requested as well as a few bonus items like peaches, tomatoes, and potato chips. We made a light dinner using those items on our first night.

Ordering from Shuttle

The following day, we discovered that using Shuttle for delivery from area restaurants was super easy. Once we placed our first order with the app, I received a call from a representative from Shuttle (to my US cell phone number) who addressed me in English and confirmed the address for the delivery. We received our food in about 45 minutes without a hitch.

So far we’ve ordered several meals and treated ourselves to Korean standards like bibimbap, bulgogi, jjimdak, samgyetang, tteokbokki, japchae and chimaek. Each of these dishes deserves its own post, so you can certainly expect to see more posts about food! Even in my limited experience, I have found that Korean food features an astounding variety of delicious flavors and textures.

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Ordering Groceries, Take 1

In contrast to deliveries from restaurants, grocery delivery has been extremely complicated. Once we sat down on our first full day in Seoul to try to place an order for a few essentials, the wheels fell off pretty quickly. Gmarket.com has an English site that is pretty easy to navigate, so we started searching for groceries.

Filling Shopping Cart

If for example you go to the fresh grocery section and select something simple like broccoli, you get 453 choices from hundreds of different sellers in quantities from one head of broccoli to 8 kg. The site has very few ways to sort the list, so you inevitably have to look through quite a few choices before adding one to the cart. Thus, several hours later we had added nine items to our cart. Great! Now we just had to enter our delivery information and place the order.

Entering Address

Addresses in Seoul can be tricky (and used to be even more tricky!) For example this is the address for one of the restaurants that we have ordered from: 67 Usadan-ro 10-gil, Hannam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, 04408. Street address, neighborhood (dong), district (gu), city, postal code. The tricky part is that websites can be finicky about how you enter the address, for example the neighborhood (eg. Hannam-dong) is often omitted. Also the order can be reversed so that the postal code goes first. In any case, after much trial and error, we finally got the address entered so that Gmarket would accept it (postal code first!).

Entering Payment Information

Almost every Korean online site only accepts cards issued from Korean banks – banks that won’t let you open an account until you file paperwork after you arrive to establish residency, which we cannot do until we are released from quarantine. This is apparently not a problem in person in the store where foreign cards are often accepted (but really how would we know?). Thankfully, Gmarket accepts foreign credit cards.

Thus we successfully placed our first grocery order on Saturday August 1^st, knowing that the items we had selected would not be shipped until at least Monday, meaning we could not expect to receive anything for at least three days. Meanwhile, we peered out of our apartment windows at the shoppers entering and exiting the small shops nearby, knowing that if we could just go outside for five minutes we could get pretty much everything that we needed. Arrgghh!

Ordering Groceries, Take 2

Through trial and error, we then realized that Gmarket’s in-country Korean site (Gmarket.co.kr) would allow users to order directly from a local grocery store. Using Chrome’s translation ability we could pretty much navigate the site (see slideshow below, click to see translation). However when we tried to place the order, only credit cards from Korean banks were listed. Foreign credit cards were not accepted! At this point we gave up and called it a night, as jet lag was really catching up with us.

Ordering Groceries, Take 3

Two days later (Monday), after deciding to look at the site again, I made a much needed breakthrough. After scrolling down on the payment page, I saw something familiar: PayPal! We quickly assembled an order and not long after had successfully placed an order for the next available delivery window. We celebrated our success: we finally figured out how to order multiple items from one local place and have them delivered on the same day. Our celebration was short-lived, however, when we received a message from Han (since he of course was the local phone contact) saying that the order had been cancelled!

Ordering Groceries, Take 4

Eventually, we determined that we had selected a delivery window that was too close to when we placed our order. I placed the order again and selected the first delivery window for the next day. All night I kept refreshing the website page, nervously waiting for a message from Han saying the order had been cancelled yet again.

Soon it was on Tuesday morning. First we received three items from our original Gmarket.com order, each in a different box. Not much later, our entire LOTTE Fresh order arrived. Later that day and the next, more items arrived from Gmarket. Groceries accomplished! Finally.