Online Shopping Still Hit or Miss With Customers
With the Internet holiday shopping season peaking this week, complaints about poor service are mounting, with online chat rooms echoing gripes about damaged goods, missed delivery dates and out-of-stock items.
But the glitches, though disappointing for consumers, are not expected to damage the online shopping business much, analysts said. Even in the midst of the holiday rush, consumers generally are satisfied with Web retailers, they say. And in some cases, retailers’ errors have favored shoppers.
Online shopper Ira Emus immediately clicked when he found a Chevrolet Camaro on CarOrder.com for $12,000, less than half the sticker price of $26,000. CarOrder.com swallowed the difference, and delivered the vehicle to an elated Emus before Thanksgiving.
“It’s amazing that they went through the transaction at all,” said Emus, a West Los Angeles computer programmer.
But the glitches that have gotten the most attention are missed shipments and poor customer service.
A survey conducted last month of customer service capabilities found that one-third of the top 100 online retailers either did not respond to e-mail or did not offer an e-mail customer-service address. About one-third responded within five hours and one-quarter took longer than a day, said FAC/Equities, the Albany, N.Y.-based financial-research firm that conducted the study.
“This was a Christmas present for my daughter and now they are locking up my credit,” an online shopper posted on a bulletin board about a delay in getting a refund for a damaged stereo returned to Egghead.com.
“A lot of these online retailers are still pretty early in setting up their systems to handle feedback,” said Michael Chen, head of Ugripe.com, an online forum for customer service issues. “They were so busy on the revenue generation side of the business with advertising and marketing, that there’s a lag on investing in the service side.”
Web merchants this year spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and marketing that promised unlimited selection and inventory, no waiting and around-the-clock convenience. But when the crowds showed up at their cyber doors, many were unprepared, particularly when it came to answering e-mails and calls.
“It’s as if they didn’t expect their advertising to work,” said Mike May, an analyst with Jupiter Communications. “Retailers simply aren’t able to live up to those promises that they made, and you can’t fault consumers for believing them.”
Many online merchants have yet to accurately tie their Web sites to their inventory systems, so that when an item runs out it is no longer displayed on the Web site, May said. That means some shoppers ordered popular items online but were notified days later that the item was sold out.
Many analysts consider this holiday season to be a testing period for consumers not yet accustomed to Internet shopping, with many going online for the first time and most doing less than 10% of their holiday shopping on the Web.
Some online retailers last week began turning away orders for gifts because they could not guarantee that they would arrive in time for Christmas, disappointing people who are starting their shopping late. But some are subsidizing overnight delivery of packages to meet the holiday deadline, and to remain competitive with established catalog companies and brick-and-mortar stores.
“We’ve clearly had a significant uptick in orders this holiday season and the fact is that we’re handling most of them reasonably well,” said Jonathan Cutler, spokesman for Etoys.com Inc. “Obviously, there will be a couple of items here and there that sell out, but for the most part we’re well-stocked for the holidays.”
Web retailers point out that on the Internet it’s much easier for dissatisfied customers to draw attention as they blow off steam.
“If everybody who had a problem with a physical store could walk outside and scream to millions of people, you would see exactly the same thing,” said Jerry Kaplan, president and chief executive of Egghead.com. “If you read all the messages on the Internet about airlines, you’d think they were in the business of stealing luggage.”
The inventory-tracking issues, for example, are no different online than in the catalog industry, where a customer service representative might have to call a shopper back after finding that an item has been sold out, Kaplan said.
Indeed, even in this record-breaking holiday season for Internet shopping, when online receipts are expected to at least double from 1998 to $6 billion, those who survey shoppers say that ratings for Web merchants remain high.
Online shoppers surveyed by BizRate Inc. this week rated their overall experience with Web retailers an 8.2, exactly the same as they did the week prior to Thanksgiving. Ratings for on-time delivery performance, which customers say is the most important factor to them, have actually improved in that time period, to 8.2 from 8.0.
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Top 10 E-Commerce Sites
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Site ’98 visitors* ’99 visitors* % chg. 1. Amazon.com 3,583 7,045 +97% 2. EBay 2,408 4,674 +94 3. EToys.com 1,415 2,256 +59 4. Buy.com 409 1,907 +366 5. Barnesandnoble.com 1,422 1,868 +31 6. Toysrus.com 398 1,746 +339 7. CDNow.com 1,455 1,492 +3 8. Travelocity.com 688 1,217 +77 9. Egreetings.com 517 1,138 +120 10. Kbkids.com 123 1,051 +755
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* Unique visitors, in thousands, as of the week of Dec. 12.
Source: Media Metrix
