The IPC Domestic E-commerce Shopper Survey provides a comparable benchmark between markets for a price of a single domestic research project. Based on the experience and economies of scale developed over the years in researching cross-border e-commerce, IPC has been providing a cost-effective research survey for domestic e-commerce since 2020.

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 to other domestic research projects, or a cost-effective alternative to individual posts undertaking market research in their own markets. In addition to a country-specific report, participants receive access to the country reports of other participating markets and an overall report to stay on top of the changing customer preferences and to track their e-commerce delivery journey.

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. 

The 2024 Domestic E-Commerce Shopper Survey was based on an online sample of 11,867 consumers spread across 11 countries. This survey is offered annually as a Selected Service and is available to both IPC members and to non-member postal operators.

The 2024 study covered some of the following topics:

Delivery preferences

  • Anticipated change in shopping frequency YoY
  • 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
  • Domestic delivery operator
  • 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 Promoter Score, by delivery carrier within each domestic market researched.
  • An overall report containing graphs and analysis for all questions in the survey, including full details by country for key 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 expert team 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 (login required).

Access to the research findings is restricted to the nine posts that funded the survey (An Post, Australia Post, Austria Post, bpost, Croatia Post, Correos, Deutsche PostELTA, New Zealand Post, Posti, and PostNL). 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].