We think delivery and fulfilment has a lot to do with it!

It’s All About Delivery!

I often tell students when teaching marketing that an often neglected area of marketing, distribution and logistics, is probably the most important activity in marketing – after the importance of people.

Basically, if it is not on the shelf or if I can’t get access to consume your offering at a time, place or location that suits me, it doesn’t matter how well promoted it is, how good the product offering is or how affordable, I won’t purchase, consume or use it! No matter how much I want too!

Delivery and fulfilment is a very important stage in the exchange process and it has a direct effect on customer evaluations of service quality, service satisfaction and future purchase intentions, not to mention word of mouth communication.

This is even more important for online retailers, be it for an offering that can be digitised or not. However, consumers often have to settle for a ‘take it or leave it’ approach to home delivery services from online retailers.

According to a report by IMRG, in 2008 over 94 million (11.5%) of e-retail home deliveries in the UK are ‘first time delivery failures’ and 8 million (1%) will be undeliverable. This results in over £420 million of direct costs from delivery inefficiencies and failures.

We wondered what role delivery information on retailer websites played?

The Importance of Providing Delivery Information Online!

Industry analysts Forrester identified that online shoppers have many questions about the delivery costs, shipping, returns, and privacy of online purchases. But according to a review of five major US retailing web sites, none of the retailers were able to answer all these questions online.

Another report published by the IMRG in 2005 reviewed 100 prominent UK retailing sites revealing that:

• 80% did not enable the customer to provide delivery instructions;
• 46% offered no delivery time options;
• 75% did not let customer choose a delivery date or offer Saturday delivery;
• 26% made the customer register or log-in before delivery costs were shown; and
• 54% did not make it clear if a signature would be required at point of delivery

We decided to dig a bit deeper into the issue of delivery information! Given the number of studies reporting the importance and usefulness of an organisations website for accessing information, we queried this.

We looked at what delivery information consumers wanted on a website and compared this to what information was actually available prior to purchased. We did a consumer survey and website content analysis of leading online retailers across Western and Central Europe. Below is summary of the full article.
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So What Did We Find?

From a survey of internet consumers we identified that consumers’ rate delivery pricing guides, delivery guarantees and delivery schedules as the most important delivery information they expect to see online prior to purchase.

However examination of over 159 leading retailer web sites across Central and Western Europe reveals that many retailers do not adequately provide this information prior to purchase to consumers, especially how they ‘guarantee product delivery’.

So the key insight – listen to your users about what delivery information they want access to prior to purchase from your website, and provide it! Make it as easy as possible to find before they have to enter any personally identifiable or credit information!

This information is crucial to build consumer trust, assurance and confidence in your online retailing offer.

Sources

• Benassi, P. (1999), “TRUSTe: An online privacy seal program“, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 56-57.
• Burt, S., and Sparkes., L. (2003), “E-commerce and the retail process: A review“, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Vol. 10 No. 5, pp. 275-286.
• Forrester. (2004), 2004 European Online Retail Consumer. Amsterdam: Forrester. Available: http://www.forrester.com
• Forrester. (2005), Poor Contextual Help Erodes Shoppers’ Trust: Forrester Research. Available: http://www.forrester.com
• IMRG. (2008). Valuing Home Delivery Interactive Media in Research Group (IMRG). Available: http://www.imrg.org/ [2008, May].
• Page-Thomas, K. L. Moss, G., Chelly, D., and Yabin, S. (2006) The provision of service delivery information prior to purchase: A missed opportunity, International Journal of Retailing & Distribution Management, Vol. 34 (4/5), 258-277. ISSN: 0959-0552. Full-text: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09590550610660224

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