A few years ago my grandma called to ask if I could come over and help her out with some ”computer stuff.” Dutifully, I dropped by to lend a hand. She informed me that she’d seen a beautiful bird feeder at a friend’s house in Florida and wanted one like it for her yard. The trouble was, she couldn’t find it anywhere. After an exhaustive search of our town’s Main Street shops yielded nothing, she turned to a new and unfamiliar medium for her shopping needs: the internet. After a few minutes of browsing, I was able to locate the exact model she wanted, put it in a shopping cart, and proceed to the checkout. Then, with credit card in hand, she told me to stop. Why? She was worried that after she bought it the feeder, it might simply get lost in “the ether.” For her, it was suspicious to pay in advance for an unseen product from a complete stranger and expect to receive it several days later. She told me she even avoided buying items from catalogs for the same reason. To her, reliability and ecommerce were incompatible.
STELLAService exists to ensure that customers never have to distrust their online retailers. One of STELLA’s criteria for outstanding service is shipment tracking. We believe that vendors who offer easy access to package tracking services make online commerce more transparent and dependable. For my grandma, who was used to in-person transactions of physical currency and goods, these types of services gave her the confidence to shop the web without fear of being ripped off or having her product get lost. As it turned out, the shipment information she received wasn’t entirely truthful. Her bird feeder arrived a day early. It has graced her back patio ever since then.
