Retail Review

Stuart Higgins and Will Dawson take a look at Marks & Spencer's delivery, collect and returns and analyse what this means for their back end operations and retail strategy.

M&S is one of the UK's high street staple brands yet it has been suffering from a widely reported trading downturn in recent years.

M&S are not known as leaders in home delivery, rather they tend to follow the trends established by the pace setters in the market.

The primary home delivery focus for M&S is simplicity: offer a single premium service known as 'Named Day' which incorporates both next day and weekend deliveries and can be arranged up to 2 weeks in advance. Pricing is competitive and a 10 p.m. cut off for next day delivery is broadly in line with their competition.

Whilst the named day offer is advantageous, the M&S Standard offer is disappointing. The Standard offer is uncompetitive both in terms of lead time and cost.

Where M&S fall down significantly is the benchmarking in relation to additional services.  There are no completely free delivery options, no free delivery threshold for  premium service, no shortened delivery  window options nor any same-day offer (or plans to start one).  They do, however, score well in their international delivery offer which covers 30 countries worldwide.

Our overall assessment of M&S, distinctly average - not market leading, but equally not too far off the pace.