When it comes to the holidays, surprises should be left to the gifts, not the delivery speed of products you order online. That’s why we tested the top 25 Internet Retailers for standard delivery speed. These are the same 25 retailers that we studied in the 2011 Cyber Monday Customer Service Study.

We ordered several products from each of the top retailers via standard shipping to various parts of the country over the last few weeks to test how long it took for the items to arrive.

Who was the fastest, and who was the slowest?

Some key highlights from the study include:

• 8 retailers had an average standard shipping time of three days or less: Zappos.com (2 days), Newegg.com (2.3 days), HPshopping.com (2.5 days), JCPenney.com (2.7 days), Amazon.com, (2.7 days), Gap.com (2.8 days), Dell.com (2.8 days), and SonyStyle.com (2.8 days).
• 3 retailers had an average standard shipping time of over 5 days:  ToysRUs.com (5.5 days),  HSN.com (5.5 days), and Kohls.com (5 days).

Does …

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One of the conveniences of online shopping is not having to leave your house to retrieve the product. The same should go for returns. Therefore, it should not be surprising that an easy returns process is something online shoppers seek out. This is especially true when shoppers buy clothes and books, the top two products purchased online that are returned or exchanged.

However, last week, the United States Postal Service announced it was considering closing 3,653 municipal post offices. The post offices in consideration are located mostly in rural areas and their closure would affect hundreds of thousands of people that depend on their services.

Since an estimated 62% of online shoppers prefer to return products purchased online via the mail instead of to the brick-and-mortar store (when a brick-and-mortar store exists) the potential shut-down of thousands of post offices means it will be a whole lot more difficult to return a product for those people whose local post offices close. …

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A few years ago my grandma called to ask if I could come over and help her out with some  ”computer stuff.” Dutifully, I dropped by to lend a hand. She informed me that she’d seen a beautiful bird feeder at a friend’s house in Florida and wanted one like it for her yard. The trouble was, she couldn’t find it anywhere. After an exhaustive search of our town’s Main Street shops yielded nothing, she turned to a new and unfamiliar medium for her shopping needs: the internet. After a few minutes of browsing, I was able to locate the exact model she wanted, put it in a shopping cart, and proceed to the checkout. Then, with credit card in hand, she told me to stop. Why? She was worried that after she bought it the feeder, it might simply get lost in “the ether.” For her, it was suspicious to pay in advance for an unseen product from a complete stranger and expect to receive it several days later. She told me she even avoided buying items from …

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Ever notice any delays in the arrival of your diapers from Diapers.com?  Did you even notice any when the company moved its warehouse operations  in 2010? We didn’t think so — here’s why:

http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=5854bb60589a6&p=fc_social

With the help of highly specialized robots, Diapers.com is not only able to process orders around its massive warehouse, it also used the robots to help move its entire warehouse operation an entire town over.  Rather than have the robots act as pickers and gatherers on its delivery line, Diapers.com shifted their function so they became movers; taking the contents of the warehouse to loading bays so that those contents could be put onto moving trucks and transported to the new, larger warehouse.

When it comes to using your computer and browser to shop online, the benefits of interactions between humans and computers are inherent and obvious.  However what’s less obvious is how computers and …

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