The company Shopsys, which builds custom e-shops, dealt with comparing the quality of online stores from the customers’ point of view. It turned out that the Czechs have a significant advantage in some services, both compared to online markets that are growing ambitiously in the country, and compared to the German “competition”. But in some respects they have some catching up to do.
Czech e-shops are the fastest in terms of delivery speed. 92 percent of e-shops delivered goods within three days, 66 percent within one day and 19 percent within two days. “If I were to compare it with the rest, it is several times faster than, for example, foreign internet marketplaces,” says Petr Krakowczyk from Shopsys.
However, according to him, domestic e-shops cannot take advantage of this advantage, because many traders do not inform about the speed of delivery. At the same time, in Germany, e-shops more often let customers know how long it will take for the goods to arrive. The analysis shows that the average delivery time in the country is 1.66 days, while in Germany it is 2.30 days, and delivery from domestic online markets takes 4.67 days.
According to Ruslan Skopal, co-founder of the consulting firm Eshop booster, however, the delivery services of the internet leader Alza.cz, which has overtaken the market not only in terms of sales volume, but also with next-day delivery service, make a good result. “The average e-shop certainly doesn’t have such fast delivery,” he says.
Krakowczyk ranks the speed of delivery among the biggest advantages behind the success of Czech e-commerce. However, he considers it a mistake not to boast of this advantage. “E-shops say: well, we’ll give it two days, the product arrives on the third day and the customer is upset. If you give e-shops one to two or two to four days, it can be counterproductive, but it’s still better than having nothing,” he says. At the same time, the Czechs also stand out in another criterion: “late delivery” after the announced date. It reaches five percent, while in Germany it is 14 percent and in the markets 11 percent.
At the same time, a domestic specialty is the relatively large competition of carriers listed on the websites of e-shops. On average, Czech e-shops list 2.41 carriers when delivering to an address, their German “colleagues” offer a choice of 1.37 carriers.
However, more traffic in the Czech version sometimes means more chaos, Krakowczyk believes. According to him, e-shops use maps in which delivery locations are sometimes difficult to find, and only 15 percent of e-shops offer a single map solution for all carriers. At the same time, the choice of delivery to delivery points is a critical phase of the purchase, where the most customers drop out.
Germans have more affordable “free shipping”
Compared to German e-shops, Czech e-shops also lag behind in the possibility of free shipping. In the country, it appears in the median from 1,500 crowns, but in Germany from 39 euros, i.e. 946 crowns.
“The standard of transport quality in the Czech Republic is high and of course this entails certain costs. Compared to Germany, we are a smaller country, the economies of scale are smaller, but the quality of services is, on the contrary, higher. If customers waited longer, the costs could be lower, but it is certainly not the goal of carriers, e-shops or customers to compromise on the quality of services,” says Jan Vetyška, executive director of the Association for Electronic Commerce, adding: “Czech e-shops have very low margins and cannot afford to pay free shipping for customers from lower amount than it is now.’
Skopal also agrees with this. “On average, the Czech e-shop has very low profitability. We decided to evaluate success at the level of turnover, but we should be guided by profit. Less than five percent of the two to three hundred e-shops we work for have an optimal 10 percent profitability. Most often, they have a margin of up to five percent,” he said.
Among the disadvantages of some Czech e-shops is the fee for picking up the goods at the store. Customers of German e-shops are completely unaware of such a fee, but in the Czech Republic it appears at 18 percent of online merchants and is on average 36 crowns.
The analysis also draws attention to another Czech specificity. From a worldwide comparison the number of fields that the customer must fill in the order is on average five, but in the Czech Republic there are 11 of these fields.
“With each additional field, the probability that the customer will complete the order decreases. (…) For example, in Germany, most e-shops don’t even want a phone number, only 14% of them asked us for it,” says Krakowczyk. On the other hand, the phone number can be a “tax” for the fact that the Czech customer has a better overview of the planned course of delivery of the shipment.
Another difference is that Czechs offer an extended period for returning goods twice as often as German e-shops, and at the same time they are not as interested in the reasons for returning goods, thereby depriving them of important information that can reduce the costs of returning goods in the future.
Returning goods on foreign markets is often more complicated. One of the markets required a fee of 50 crowns for the return of the goods, while others, based on an algorithm, decide to return some customers not money, but credits for the purchase of other goods, credited to the customer’s account.
Shopsys analyzed over 200 domestic online stores and also used customer experience data from the Bridge Market company, which helps Czech online sellers expand abroad. The results include 35 e-shops from Germany.