Digital commerce technology provider Innotrac announced last week that it has released its annual SmartHub Cyber Monday study for 2013. The report focuses on a number of businesses and tracks their actions in key performance areas related to last year's online holiday. Innotrac evaluates over 230 online merchants and focuses on data points that include shipping times, special promotions, and customer service.
Cyber Monday is related to the well-known Black Friday and Small Business Saturday shopping events that take place following Thanksgiving. While the other two shopping days focus on brick-and-mortar shops, Cyber Monday is a day for online retailers. And this past year, on Dec. 2, customer purchases that took place from desktop computers reached $1.735 billion, an 18 percent increase from the previous year.
Innotrac found that shipping and delivery timing were heavily affected by the increase in the number of orders. Businesses shipped their products at a relatively slow pace, with 12.9 percent of orders going out the same day of purchase and 27.3 percent the day after. That adds up to only 40.2 percent of order shipped within the two days following a purchase, down from the average 58 percent found throughout the rest of 2013. Additionally, that shipping percentage is down from the 2012 Cyber Monday figure of 53 percent of orders shipping by the next day.
A related highlight from the study includes the amount of time packages spent actually being delivered from the time they left the online retailer. This past year, the amount of packages which spent four or more days in transit doubled from the previous year. Combined with the decreased number of packages leaving shops the same or next day, customers overall were likely waiting for their orders much longer than in previous years.
The news is not all bad, however. As perhaps a reward for their customers' patience, the percentage of retailers which didn't offer free shipping was down from 44 percent to 21 percent when compared to shipping policies enacted throughout the rest of the year. Retailers also handled customer issues with more speed than in previous years, settling customer inquiries at an average rate of just over four minutes per customer.
The 2013 Cyber Monday study can be found here.