One In Four Online Purchases Thwarted

By REUTERS

The problem with the explosion of online stores is that more than a quarter of all the purchases attempted over the Internet never go through, according to a study.

Andersen Consulting went shopping at 100 of the biggest and best-known online stores. Outof 480 gifts it tried to buy, it was able to complete only 350 purchases.

The study found more than one quarter of the top Web sites either could not take orders, crashed in the process, were under construction, had entry blocked, or were otherwise inaccessible.

"It was pretty eye-opening," said Robert Mann of Andersen's supply-chain practice.

Mann said he was stunned by the results of the survey, which had initially been designed to study only the time it took to complete and fulfill orders.

Mann said he found instead that "speed is not really the issue. The issue is reliability."

Although Andersen did not single out the best and the worst of these online stores, none of them was problem-free, he said. In general, though, the study found the traditional retailers had a worse track record than the pure-play Internet stores.

"The e-tailers who depend on this as their bread and butter have generally invested more on back-end systems," Mann said. "Many retailers have not invested as well."

Another big problem is orders not arriving on time. The traditional retailers were once again the big offenders, according to the study, which found they delivered the order when promised only about 20 percent of the time. E-tailers, by comparison, were on time about 80 percent of the time.

Curiously, some items took much longer to deliver. The average time for an electronics gift to arrive was 3.9 days, while music deliveries typically took 7.4 days.

Andersen plans to next study online merchants' ability to handle returns -- which Mann said could be their next big challenge if consumers sent back all those gifts that did not arrive by Christmas Day.