In fact, of the 13 sites that won accolades as fulfillment "overachievers" by Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, the only pure-play dot-coms were Amazon.com, Buy.com, and MotherNature.com. To be included on the list, companies had to score 20% above average across four measurements and show significant improvement over last year, Accenture associate partner Robert Mann says. The others in the group were experienced retailers: Borders.com, Calyxandcorolla.com, Gap.com, Godiva.com, Iqvc.com, Landsend.com, LLBean.com, Nordstrom.com, OfficeMax.com, and Sears.com.

Overall, E-retailers still have plenty of work to do to smooth out the customer experience. Twelve percent of the 1,000 orders Accenture placed for this year's E-Tail Survey didn't arrive in time for Christmas--and a whopping 67% of sites didn't meet the basic customer-satisfaction criteria of promising to deliver goods by a given date, and then keeping that promise. "If you can't do that, I don't know how you can expect to compete with brick-and-mortar stores where customers just pick the goods off the shelf," Mann says.

E-retailers may lag in outbound fulfillment, but the processing of returns is a weak link for online merchants across the board. Only 58% of retailers with physical stores allow in-store returns at all, and of those, 40% confuse their customers by not applying the policy uniformly. On the other hand, only 51% of E-retailers make things simple by including preprinted return labels in orders, compared with 80% of retailers and catalogers.

Shoppers' feelings of frustration this Christmas were echoed in aPricewaterhouseCoopers survey released Tuesday, in which just 55% of online shoppers, and 79% of online buyers, reported being totally satisfied with their experience. That's down from last year's 82% satisfaction rate among online buyers. Purchases not arriving on time for the holidays still topped the list of complaints, followed by inadequate e-mail reports regarding order status and having to pay extra to ensure that orders arrived on time. Problems cited by online shoppers who decided not buy included merchandise being out of stock, excessive page load times, and products not available online.

For more on E-tailers' problems go to http://www.informationweek.com/819/returns.htm