Million Items lost each year and it’s your fault

“24 million British shoppers will spend 5 billion online this Christmas, an average of £208 each, generating 130 million internet shopping deliveries.”

On the outside every thing looks rosy in the garden. After all, we learnt from our mistakes with the dot com crash in the late 90’s, we invested in proper business, proper customer fulfillment, more accurate web analytics, usability testing, merchants are getting smarter and affiliates are right up there with them, in many cases ahead, enough to say that your visitors are relatively happy and getting more confident about ordering online.

Royal Mail Group’s overall profit rose 20% with boost from European parcels business. I have an image in my head of a young couple laughing, holding hands and wi-fi enabled laptops secure in their little lap top back packs and music swelling to the tune of “the Hills are alive with the sound of clicks”.

According to a BBC report Royal Mail admit that the 14.4 million items gets lost and of these, 60% are just put through the wrong letter box. Of that, more than half received mail not intended for them in the past six months. One in 20 said they threw the item away and a handful admitted they had opened post which was not theirs.

Apparently this is not Royal mails fault but yours! Yes you read that correctly! it’s all your fault! Why? Because only 10% of people complained, Post watch chairman Peter Carr said: "Our message to customers is that if Royal Mail do not know about a problem they cannot fix it." Did you spot the faux pas?

I for one am concerned that the postal service may be the Achilles heal in the evolving e-commerce industry, the grinding mechanisms of this giant seem to be slowing down, what if the customer that you referred via your promoted merchant was one of the 14.4 million that had a bad experience with the parcel going missing (from an affiliates perspective) and what would be the lost revenue from this customer over a period of a year (from an affiliate’s and merchant’s perspective)? Last thought, why is it that my spam snail mail always finds its way to the right address?

This release was published on openPR.