Two TVs, two delivery slots on the same day. What a waste of resources, one Essential Retail/Legend employee describes.

I wanted a new TV and decided to buy one from AO.com one Monday morning, mainly because it was competitively priced. I was also pleasantly surprised to see I could choose a delivery date and decided on the following Thursday – 10 days later – because I knew my fiancé was going to be home to accept the delivery and we were in no rush.

The following day, the missus decided she wanted another TV, so we decided to buy a second, slightly smaller one for a different room and obviously I went straight back to AO.com and logged into my account to purchase. I could see my purchase history with the TV I bought the day before and I was able to arrange delivery for TV No 2 on the same Thursday – still a week away.

Delivery day arrives and a man with a van turns up at 7.30am, before I’ve headed into the office. He hands over one TV, and I tell him to check his van as there’s probably a second in the back. But there wasn’t, he drove off and my fiancé had to wait until 4pm for DPD to deliver the second.

It was frustrating because she had to wait in all day as we had no idea what time the second delivery was going to arrive – of course this would have been the case if both TVs had turned up with DPD at 4pm. But when you think about the fulfilment costs,  petrol, third-party carriers, not to mention the impact of two deliveries on the environment, it was confusing for the TVs not to be delivered at the same time. AO.com has a 360, 000 sq ft warehouse in Crewe, so if both the man in a van and DPD had to travel all the way from the North West to Kent that is even more ridiculous.

And it just made no sense, I have an account and the eCommerce retailer even called me the day before to confirm the delivery of two items. The e-tailer could be saving so much time and resource if it tightened up its order management system and tied those two orders together.