When Should You Expect That Last Minute Holiday Gift to Arrive?

When it comes to the holidays, surprises should be left to the gifts, not the delivery speed of products you order online. That’s why we tested the top 25 Internet Retailers for standard delivery speed. These are the same 25 retailers that we studied in the 2011 Cyber Monday Customer Service Study.

We ordered several products from each of the top retailers via standard shipping to various parts of the country over the last few weeks to test how long it took for the items to arrive.

Who was the fastest, and who was the slowest?

Click on image to enlarge

Some key highlights from the study include:

• 8 retailers had an average standard shipping time of three days or less: Zappos.com (2 days), Newegg.com (2.3 days), HPshopping.com (2.5 days), JCPenney.com (2.7 days), Amazon.com, (2.7 days), Gap.com (2.8 days), Dell.com (2.8 days), and SonyStyle.com (2.8 days).
• 3 retailers had an average standard shipping time of over 5 days:  ToysRUs.com (5.5 days),  HSN.com (5.5 days), and Kohls.com (5 days).

Does the speed of delivery depend on what part of the country you’re in?

Click on image to enlarge

Turns out that the average delivery speed for standard shipping is slightly faster for those of you on the east coast (another east coast bias?).

Wishing everyone a no-surprises, hassle-free, speedy standard shipping holiday!

Holidays Bring Joyful and Frustrating Customer Service for Online Shoppers (Part 2 – Email Support)

Note: this is the second in a three part series looking at the customer service performance of the top 25 online retailers during the 2011 Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend. View Part 1 (Phone Support) and Part 3 (Live Chat Support) for a complete view on how the largest online retailers cared for customers during the big shopping holiday.

According to Forrester, 55% of online shoppers use email when attempting to solve a customer service problem.  Most consumers expect relatively quick responses to email inquiries. In fact, if you’re shopping online and have a question, what’s the point of sending an email if the company doesn’t get back to you for days? The product, special deal or issue in question may no longer be relevant by the time you get a reply.

To give shoppers a better idea of which stores plan to keep you in the loop and which stores are likely to dismiss your message into the email abyss as you do your online holiday shopping, STELLAService is providing an unprecedented look at the email response rates of the largest online retailers.

Click to enlarge

While it might seem obvious that retailers would (or should) reply to all emails sent to them by shoppers with questions, it’s far from reality!

• During the holiday weekend, only 67% of emails were answered within 24 hours (compares to 73% during the baseline period of the first two weeks of November).
• Only four retailers responded to 100% of the emails sent to them within 24 hours (HPShopping.com; Toys ‘R’ Us; Amazon.com and Overstock.com).
• Five retailers responded to only 25% (or fewer!) of the emails within 24 hours.

These numbers are most likely eye-opening for many people, but they probably resonate when you think back to prior experiences. Did you email any of the large online retailers over the weekend? If so, did they get back to you within a day?

————————————————————-

Methodology: Baseline data was collected by emailing each retailer each day (336 total emails) over a 14 day period, from November 1st through November 14th, asking general customer service questions in each email (product questions, shipping or returns information, etc). Black Friday through Sunday data was collected by emailing each retailer four (4) times each day over a three day period, from Friday November 25th to Sunday November 27th. Emails were placed at random during the following time-blocks to generate measurements of service performance that have high reliability and construct validity: 8:00 -11:30am EST; 11:30 – 2:00pm EST; 2:00 – 5:00pm EST; 5:00 – 8:00pm EST; 8:00 – 11:00pm EST.