Newsletter 39  July 2008/2

On average, workers take a day and a half off work a year to wait in for home deliveries, according to a survey by Kelkoo, the shopping comparison subsidiary of Yahoo. It says this costs the economy £1.6 billion. Nearly half the workers surveyed (45 per cent) said they had taken time off, and nearly a quarter of those (22 per cent) lied about the reason. Thirty-four per cent of woman and 31 per cent of men blamed a doctor’s appointment. Among men, 12 per cent said they were working from home, while 8 per cent of women made that claim.

Eighty-one per cent of those surveyed said they had had at least one experience of buying something online that did not arrive as expected. Other major complaints included total costs not being clear at the outset (16 per cent), deliveries not arriving in good condition (16 per cent) and late deliveries (10 per cent).

The survey comes hard of he heels of a similar one by IMRG (On Track & On Target, issue 37), which found that more than a quarter of would-be home shoppers were discouraged to some extent by concerns about delivery. The Kelkoo survey found that 94 per cent of shoppers would hesitate to buy again from a supplier whose delivery performance had proved problematic.