Winter 2009/10

Online retailers in the UK are getting better at delivery, according to the fifth annual Online Retail Delivery in the UK report from consultancy Snow Valley – but the market still has some way to go before it offers the highest standards in all aspects of delivery.

The report is glowing in terms of the number of retailers providing online order tracking. This was 84 per cent in 2009, compared with 72 per cent last year and just 59 per cent in 2005, when the survey started. And no fewer than 94 per cent of retailers sent an email to confirm the order – though only a tiny handful (five) used texting to alert customers of delivery progress.

However, although the report finds major improvements in many aspects of delivery since 2005, some statistics show little improvement (and even some lapses) since last year. For instance, the number of retailers offering some kind of collect-from-store option last year was little changed at 15 per cent, and the number offering free delivery above a given order value was only marginally up at 39 per cent.

The report found that many premium services had remained almost the same over the past five years. For example, Saturday delivery was available on 26 per cent of sites, compared with 23 per cent back in 2005; and nominated-day and time of day delivery, already offered by 14 per cent of retailers in 2005, had only crept up to 15 per cent by 2009.

 

Some glaring lapses in user-friendliness also persisted. For instance, on 71 per cent of the 136 sites examined, typing 'delivery' in the search box produced no useful result – a vivid indictment of the way the customer interaction is so often driven by the marketing functionality of retail web sites, and can lack any over-arching filtering mechanism to interpret the user's actual intentions.

Snow Valley points out that nearly half of what it classifies as 'large' retailers did present useful information in response to a search on 'delivery'; but that means over half did not.

The report found that a third of sites gave no indication of delivery charges until the final stages of purchase – though it acknowledges that this can be difficult if the user has selected a variety of product types, and not yet selected a delivery option.

This year's report was sponsored by Metapack, and can be downloaded from the Snow Valley web site at www.snowvalley.com