Study: Delivery providers stumble in key metric

In the first part of December, delivery providers experienced difficulties that probably left some holiday shoppers less than merry.



According to analysis of what more than 130,000 shoppers said in surveys about on-time deliveries of their full orders between Dec. 1 - Dec. 10 by Bizrate Insights, a division of Connexity, the timeliness trend is clearly downward.



Bizrate Insights data indicated on-time delivery rate went from almost 93.5% on Tuesday, Dec. 1 to less than 91.5% on Thursday, Dec. 10. There were small day-over-day spikes in on-time delivery rate on Saturday, Dec. 5 and Tuesday, Dec 8. Otherwise, the rate steadily declined every day in the period.



“On-time delivery is quite important to maintaining customer loyalty, especially when there is a holiday or event deadline,” said Hayley Silver, VP, Bizrate Insights. “The 2% drop that we see across this 10-day period alone equates to tens of thousands disappointed gift buyers.”



Other data also indicates deliveries so far may not be meeting consumer expectations. According to a new report rom Kurt Salmon, the average order-to-delivery time across 62 retailers studied was 6.9 days. This was 20% slower than the average of all retailers surveyed in the prior year’s study. In the remaining 10 days of holiday delivery, retailers should strive to be as timely as possible.