[London, ENGLAND] Business and technology consultancy PLAUT says in a report published
Thursday that online retailers in the U.K. have such deeply flawed
after-sales services that they could make Christmas miserable for their shoppers.
Buyer beware? Very much so, says the PLAUT e-Returns Study,
which examined 25 major e-commerce sites and found “serious
problems” in the cancellations and returns process of
nearly three-quarters of them.
Just 15 percent of e-commerce companies operating in the
U.K. are providing a level of service equivalent to that
found in shops on the High Street.
So what’s going wrong? Nearly everything, according to
PLAUT. Customers are being charged for goods they have
cancelled; their online orders are being lost; their
returned goods are being refused; they are put on hold
for periods of up to 90 minutes if they phone; and retailers
are keeping the Value Added Tax (VAT) on those occasions
when the cost of goods is refunded.
Karl Thurston, managing director, PLAUT UK, said the study
showed that many e-commerce sites are merely “paying lip
service to customer service.”
“Service this poor wouldn’t be tolerated on the High Street,
and must be putting people off shopping online,” said Thurston.
PLAUT list no less than 13 major problems — a list long
enough to give even the most confident online retailer
cause for concern.
Among the problems are missing items from orders, financial
errors in the returns process, tracking numbers not matching
online and off, and buggy sites that fail to behave correctly
across all browsers.
Some of the faults seem to be fairly easy to correct, if
only the retailers put more effort into their sites. For
example, many fail to display a customer returns policy
— a task that requires just a page of text.
Thurston points out that businesses which operate entirely
on the Web will fail if they are not customer-centric, while
traditional High Street retailers are likely to damage their
whole business if they give poor service online.
“There is a real danger that poor online customer care will
lead to a miserable Christmas for consumers and ultimately
for retailers as well,” warned Thurston.
With 7 million people expected to shop online in the U.K.
this Christmas, spending around US $185 each (according to
MORI), serious damage could be caused to the industry if
many of them are disappointed.
PLAUT is not afraid to name names, placing e-commerce firms
into “Very Poor,” “Poor,” “Average,” “Good,” and “Excellent”
categories.
Dixons, the company that gave birth to Freeserve, appears in
the “Very Poor” category for its tendency to deliver cancelled
goods.
Appliance Direct, Bigsave.com, Country Bookshop, Marks and
Spencer, and Virgin Wines are among the very few companies
that make it to the “Excellent” category for a flawless
purchase, delivery and returns process.