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E-commerce delivery is the biggest opportunity for postal operators and up-to-date research is essential for maintaining and growing postal market share. Domestic e-commerce markets have evolved at different rates and some markets are significantly more developed than others. That is why it is important to benchmark consumer preferences and experiences across different markets, so posts can learn lessons from mature markets, and adapt and optimise their service offering.
Although postal operators may undertake their own domestic research, it is often in the absence of a comparable benchmark between markets, and this can also be very expensive. Based on the experience and economies of scale developed over the years in researching cross-border e-commerce, IPC provides an extremely cost effective research survey for domestic e-commerce. This also benefits from the input of postal market research experts in all the participating countries who are actively engaged in defining the research questionnaire. The IPC Domestic Shopper Survey can either be complementary, or a cost effective alternative to individual posts undertaking market research in their own markets. In addition to a country specific report, it provides comparable research between markets in order to inform postal operators of changing customer needs and to support their decision making.
How does it work?
The IPC Domestic E-Commerce Shopper Survey is available to every post which chooses to participate with a representative online sample of consumers within each participating market with approximately 1,000 in each country (depending on population). The target group is frequent domestic online shoppers, who have made an online purchase from a domestic e-retailer (excluding groceries) in the last three months. The target group is determined by quotas based on the age and gender profiles of the online population per country. In line with the IPC Sustainability strategy, consumer expectations and habits related to sustainability are an important focus of the survey.
The 2021 Domestic E-Commerce Shopper Survey was based on an online sample of 8,119 consumers spread across 10 countries. This survey is offered annually as a Selected Service and is available to both IPC members and to non-member
postal operators.
The 2021 study covered some of the following topics:
Delivery preferences
- Impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce
- Importance of delivery elements
- Delivery speed expectations
- Delivery locations used & attitudes towards parcel lockers
- Preferred returns delivery location
- Membership of Amazon Prime and similar subscription schemes
- Sustainable delivery preferences
Online shopping behaviours
- Domestic e-retailer bought from most recently
- Reason for shopping online rather than in-store
- Influence of advertising (and direct mail) on this purchase
- Product weight and size
- Product value and delivery cost
- Parcel tracking
- Delivery location
- Delivery speed
- Returns
- Satisfaction with delivery experience
Benefits
- Benchmarking domestic e-commerce markets using a standardised survey developed with the market insights experts from the IPC membership
- Identifies Key Performance Indicators including market share, customer satisfaction and Net Promotor Score, by delivery carrier within each domestic market researched.
- Opportunity to benchmark performance against other participating countries.
- An overall report containing graphs and analysis for all questions in the survey, including full details by country for all questions.
- Country Reports comparing each country’s results to the average along with an analysis at country level and trend results for countries participating in multiple waves of the survey.
- Major economies of scale through centralised research commissioned, managed, analysed and reported by IPC based on a common methodology and questionnaire translated into the local language by the participating postal operator.
Posts participating in the survey can access the country reports as well as the overall report below.
Access to the research findings is restricted to the seven posts that funded the survey (bpost, Posti, ELTA, Correos, Slovenia Post, New Zealand Post and An Post). To access the reports below, please log in to our extranet via the 'Login' box in the top-right corner of this page. If you do not have an account yet, please register here. Should you have any issues logging into your account, registering or accessing the documents, please contact us at [email protected].