eCommerce Delivery: The stats are in

Delivery is crucial to eCommerce and can turn an excellent customer experience into a bad one - but which retailers offer the best performance? New statistics from StellaService delve deeper into eCommerce delivery to find out.

The last crucial step

Online retailers want to ensure that consumers have the best possible shopping experience and routinely try their hardest to meet those expectations - but they also have far less control when it comes to delivery, which increases the relevance of using a multi-carrier solution, should one carrier go bust.

So, you can have wonderful products at unbelievably reasonable prices, teamed with a user-intuitive, easy-to-use website, only to fall at the final hurdle when your products arrive five days late - or don't turn up at all.

What consumers want

According to econsultancy.com, a good delivery experience should consist of the following:

• Accurate and easily comprehensible online tracking
• Informative (but not annoying) communication about their order via email, text or phone updates
• Good communication when the inevitable problems do occasionally crop up
• A non-premium rate phone number when contacting a courier
• A high standard of customer support from the retailer at every stage of the process, but mainly when problems occur

The best delivery performances

StellaService conducted their study on 10 of the UK's largest retailers over three months, starting in November 2014 - in other words, the run-up to the busy Christmas period. The retailers included the likes of John Lewis, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, Very and Argos.

Each order was placed using only the standard delivery option (as opposed to express or special delivery) and took an average of 3.5 days to arrive at its intended destination.

The best performers were John Lewis, Boots, Argos and Very, from which deliveries took less than three days. However, the winner (in terms of speed) was Very, with most packages delivered the next day and an overall average of 2.2 days.

However, Very also had the most expensive shipping, at £3.95 - so you could say consumers are paying extra for that superb delivery service.

The bottom two performers took an average of 5.7 days to deliver their orders.