Retailers Face Customer Frustrations Over Late, Undelivered Packages

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

A last minute holiday e-commerce surge overwhelmed shipping services, led to shipping delays

Between the shortened holiday season, a proliferation of retailers offering promotions, procrastinating customers, and projections for slower holiday sales, retailers have spent the last couple weeks biting their nails down to the quick. And, this year a new problem arose: there were too many online sales. Considering e-commerce and omni-channel initiatives are the key to a competitive future in the retail industry, too much online traffic doesn’t sound like a bad thing. However, both retailers and shipping companies were unprepared for the surge in last-minute online orders this year, which resulted in a large number of late deliveries and irate customers turning to retailers to launch complaints.

Drawn by last minute deals, bad weather in the northeast, and a rapidly approaching holiday, customers turned to online channels to buy presents, requesting overnight and second-day air shipping options more often than usual to get presents under the tree in time. As retailers prepared orders and sent them out via various delivery companies, more and more customers began to see promised delivery dates pass by.

Retailers, such as Yankee Candle, began to get an earful. Yankee Candle Company president and CMO Brad Wolansky said, while weather could have had an effect on delivery speed, it was first and foremost “a volume issue. Packages were way, way above what anyone had forecasted …” Indeed, UPS spokeswoman Natalie Black confirmed that “the volume of air packages in our system exceeded the capacity in our network.”

For Yankee Candle in particular, the company started to hear of problems at least two weeks in advance of the last holiday shopping weekend. While originally the retailer thought it was an issue with its internal system, Yankee discovered that shipped packages lacked delivery service tracking numbers. These tracking issues resulted in an “extraordinary high level of abuse” as customers turned to Yankee demanding answers as to why their packages had not yet been delivered. Wolansky says, “Not knowing where the package was was the worst part of this. We could never tell whether the package was being delivered; even though we shipped all of them.”

Yankee was not the only retailer to hear similar complaints from irate customers. Kohl’s saw a large number of customers turning to its Facebook page to express their frustrations at the retailer’s inability to fulfill and deliver orders on time. While Amazon says its systems were efficient in getting customers their purchases on time, the company has pledged to offer $20 gift cards and refunds on shipping charges to complaining customers. UPS has also promised to refund shipping costs to those who didn’t get their gifts on time. As for the similarly frustrated Yankee Candle, the company is following a similar approach; it will start by refunding customers’ shipping fees. Should a customer ask for a gift card, the retailer will, of course, provide them with one.

This holiday has left some speculating about steps retailers could take in the future to improve shipping efficiency. For instance, Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says online retailers could begin cutting down on free shipping offers or begin raising prices before busy shipping periods.

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