In the top of?e-commerce in Germany, customers seldom have the opportunity to choose which shipping service best suits their needs
Checkout & shipping in Germany – research. Source: shutterstock.com
A new report ‘E-Commerce Shipping Study 2018‘ by ParcelLab focuses on the strengths and potential capabilities in checkout and shipping of the 100 largest online shops in Germany. It shows that online retailers are throwing away millions of euros in potential sales every month, because after checkout retailers don’t focus on the customer anymore, Ecommerce News reports.
It turns out that customer centricity, a hot item in e-commerce nowadays, ends after checkout. In other words: whenever customers have completed an online order, they have to seek information from the online retailer, rather than the other way around. And because of this, the major online retailers are throwing away millions of euros in potential sales every month, ParcelLab says.
In the top of?e-commerce in Germany, customers seldom have the opportunity to choose which shipping service best suits their needs: customers of 79% of the top 100 online stores can’t choose between different providers. They have to accept the delivery service the e-commerce website operates with.
Things aren’t much better when it comes to choosing a preferred delivery time. Only one in three retailers offer express delivery in addition to the standard option, and only 11 online retailers offered the option to have the products delivered on the same day. Besides, only 10% of the retailers?give an exact delivery date: the majority just leaves their customers in the dark and only give an estimated delivery date. In some occasions, this could cover a few days.
The study by ParcelLab also shows that only 13 out of the 100 online retailers offer free shipping, while 38 offer free shipping when minimum order value is reached. And when customers do need to pay for their delivery it isn’t cheap: the average shipping costs are 4.79 euros.
Another interesting finding is that only a quarter of the online retailers show shipment tracking in their own store. But what’s even more surprising is that the same number of online retailers, 24, had a parcel tracking number sent to the customer which led to the error message “Tracking number not known”.
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