The Delivery Files: byrd's Test Flight Report

We placed 33 test orders with 30 European D2C brands. What shops promise, what actually arrives, and what the best ones do differently.

Supplements · Beauty · Food & Drink · Health · Fashion · Sports · Home · Accessories · Baby
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What we found

Five findings from 33 real orders

No survey. No estimates. Real purchases, documented from homepage to doorstep.

01

More brands kept their promise than missed it

14 out of 23 measurable cases delivered on time. But when brands miss, they don't miss by a day. They miss by a week or more.

02

Internal fulfillment is almost always the bottleneck

Not the carrier. We saw gaps between order and ship-confirmation ranging from same day to 22 days.

03

Cross-border tracking gaps hurt customer trust

Multi-day pauses where the parcel existed but shoppers had no idea where it was. The same brands score worse on Trustpilot in non-domestic markets.

04

Pre-purchase transparency is mediocre for most

Only three brands scored 5/5 for pre-purchase delivery transparency. A missed conversion opportunity.

05

Mandatory app tracking is the new friction point

Two brands forced customers to download a mobile app to track their parcel, even though a perfectly good carrier tracking page already existed.

About the report

What's inside

We placed orders. A lot of them. With 30 different European D2C brands across nine categories — Supplements, Beauty, Food & Drink, Health, Fashion, Sports, Home, Accessories and Baby. Then we documented every step, from the moment the homepage loaded to the day the parcel arrived.

  • How often brands actually kept their delivery promise
  • Why the carrier is almost never the reason a parcel is late
  • The cross-border tracking gap nobody likes to talk about
  • Where marketplace fulfillment quietly outperforms direct D2C, and what brands can copy
  • Concrete examples, patterns worth copying, and patterns worth avoiding
  • A practical 11-point self-audit for your shop in 10 minutes
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The Delivery Files: byrd's test flight report
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16 pages, instant PDF download
Real data from 33 test orders
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