Frustrations grow over holiday e-tailing
But a few days later, Cicci, a 41-year-old mother of two, says she got some bad news: eToys (Nasdaq: ETYS) said it had shipped the batteries, but the airplane was "back-ordered." The batteries soon arrived at her Pittsburgh home via Priority Mail. "So I paid $3 shipping for $2.98 in batteries," she says.
On Thursday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) posted a note on its Web site warning that it can't guarantee delivery by Dec. 25. Alex Clarke, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, says the company had received so many orders that it realized they might not all be packed and shipped by Christmas. "We're just trying to take the high ground and let our customers know," she says.
Given the crush of demanding customers, some snafus are hardly surprising. An estimated 20 million people are believed to be shopping online this holiday season, many of them for the first time. They are expected to place 37,245,400 orders worth as much as $15 billion on thousands of Web sites, some only weeks old. And the peak days for shipping have yet to come.
FDX Corp., parent of Federal Express, says it expects to be carrying 4.5 million packages a day between Dec. 21 and Dec. 23. "From our point of view, things are running pretty smoothly," says a spokesman.
No comment
E-retailers, in general, say they won't comment on individual customers or disclose holiday sales figures. eToys, based in Santa Monica, Calif., says it is handling the overwhelming majority of its holiday orders very well this year. "Our intent is to return all customer inquiries within 24 hours," says Ken Ross, the company's vice president of corporate communications. "We may not be perfect, but the fact is that we are working seven days a week, 24 hours a day, to respond to every single one of the thousands of inquiries we are getting."
He says eToys has been "getting consistently high marks" in areas such as delivery and customer service in surveys by BizRate.com (www.bizrate.com), an online research firm. eToys still guarantees delivery before Christmas of orders placed through midnight Dec. 14 with standard delivery, and through Dec. 17 with priority delivery.
Fingerhut, Federated Department Stores Inc.'s e-commerce and catalog unit, says it is processing about 300,000 orders a day -- 65 percent more than last year. It fills orders for Macys.com, Bloomingdales.com and eToys.com, as well as its own Web sites and catalogs. About 200 Fingerhut executives are helping to pack and box orders in the St. Cloud, Minn., warehouse. "We're just making it," says Fingerhut CEO William J. Lansing, calling on his lunch break from the warehouse, where he spent all morning packing boxes. "I'm knocking out 75 orders an hour," he boasts.
Having spent small fortunes on advertising to whip up interest and traffic for their Web sites, 'dotcom' retailers must now contend with the results. Some analysts worry about the consequences if e-retailers fumble the customer-service ball: "If the overall 1999 online customer purchasing experience proves displeasurable, customers may be reluctant to shop online again ... " warned a recent report from FAC/Equities, a unit of brokerage firm First Albany Corp. Of course, many e-customers couldn't be more satisfied and are delighted with their experience on the Web. Judi Desorcie, the single mother of an eight-year-old son, says if she couldn't shop online after her son goes to bed, she doesn't know when she would do it. "I feel a little like an elf at night, logging in," she says.
Heather Ordover, a high-school teacher in New York who has been sending baked goods to friends through the Web, adds, "We had universally good experiences online."
For others, the experience has been more complicated. Toy shoppers are reporting some of the biggest headaches. Tammy McHugh, of Skippack, Pa., decided to try it after her neighbor, Monica Zortea, raved about a deal on toysrus.com, the Web site of Toys 'R' Us Inc. (NYSE: TOY): $10 off a purchase of $25 or more made by Dec. 1, and also free standard shipping. Zortea warned her friend it wouldn't be easy to get on the Web site: She'd had to log on at 6 a.m. McHugh tried 25 times to get on. Finally, she made it and shopped for an hour and a half.
Alas, none of the five items she wanted were available: Either the site didn't carry them or they had sold out. "That is when I said, 'I don't think this is going to work,' " says McHugh. She finished up her holiday shopping in a real store the day after Thanksgiving.
Toysrus.com says the problems that slowed the system in mid-November have been resolved and consumers can get on without difficulty. The company shored up its systems with hundreds of servers and other kinds of support to handle the rush, says spokeswoman Leeann Lavin.
Shoppers are buying early this year, she adds, and the company has indeed run out of certain items, including the Caucasian Millennium Princess Barbie. "We're in this for the long haul, and we're working to continually improve the site," Lavin says.
Three weeks ago, Mark Huntington, of Austin, Texas, went to eToys and ordered three Lego toys for his children. He received a confirmation right away, but after two weeks went by with no Lego, he says, he called eToys to find out what was up. The computers were down, he says, so he tried a second time, at 11 p.m., and this time a customer-service representative promised to look into his situation.
The next day, he got an e-mail saying that the original confirmation had been wrong: The Lego toys weren't in stock when he ordered and were now on back-order. He says he just got a third e-mail informing him that the toys had indeed been shipped, but only one of the three toys showed up at his office on Friday afternoon. On the phone that night, a company service representative agreed to Federal Express the entire shipment again Monday. "It hasn't been a pleasant experience," Huntington says.
Ross, of eToys, says, "When we've learned of problems that may exist, we've picked up the phone and called customers personally -- in many cases, even before they have been aware of a potential issue."
Logistical complications
E-shoppers are finding the process involves its own logistical complications. Two weeks ago, Gregory Pettit, a single, 40-year-old New Yorker, went shopping online for toys and books for his nine nieces, nephews and godchildren. He bought the gifts on Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), which delivered everything to him within two days.
Still, he was disappointed that Amazon wouldn't wrap the toys he had ordered, only the books. (The company says it doesn't offer gift-wrapping on oversize item.) So he had the whole order shipped to New York, so he could wrap everything up and ship it to Oregon, where the children live. Two big boxes of toys and books are sitting on his desk at work. "It's a bit of a pain -- it would have been ideal if I never had to see this stuff at all," Pettit says.
Even the happy customers in cyberspace say the experience could be improved. Susie Woodhams, the mother of a two-year-old son who is expecting her second, says she "hit the bonanza" with eToys. She has been spending the last few weeks of the pregnancy in bed.
Among her purchases was a Barbie doll, a gift for one of her son's little friends, which she had gift-wrapped, for an extra $2.95. But when the wrapped-up gift arrived in a box, which looked like the wrong size for a Barbie, "I said, 'I guess she is folded up in there,' " Woodhams recalls. She opened it up and found the card game she had ordered for a niece. The rest of the gifts arrived on Tuesday -- including the Barbie, which wasn't gift-wrapped.
Woodhams has taken the foul-up in stride: She e-mailed the company to compliment them on the items that arrived correctly and on-time but offered a mild complaint about the Barbie mix-up. Woodhams says she was pleased by the company's prompt e-mail response, which included a refund of the $2.95 wrapping fee.