Here at the Cardsphere Disputes Desk, I deal with people's expectations on a daily basis. Pretty much once a day someone types into the dispute message box that they "...sent out three other packages that same day and they all arrived a week ago!"
It's natural to feel this way, of course. Online trading for physical items runs on the trust that other traders are going to be diligent, fair, and honest. I've traded online now for around 6 years across three different platforms and that experience, combined with handling 95% of the disputes on Cardsphere as an Admin, tells me that people are diligent, fair, and honest.
In December and January, we've just gone through our first bumpy season for post. Mail times were out of whack, and there was more lost and delayed mail than is typical. Encouragingly, the rate at which people contacted me to undo disputes where receivers were refunded stayed as high as ever. I love when this happens! It's actually a little bit of work for me to correct the balances and the statistics on the accounts, but I sure am happy to do it.
We've always intended to make lots of data public about shipping times, but being a small team with ever-shifting priorities, we simply haven't gotten around to it yet inside the Cardsphere platform. But now that we've passed through the holiday season, we thought we'd share the data we have.
The Data
The CSV file includes all Cardsphere trade data up to 2/19/2018. Only pairs of countries with more than 10 trades are included. The data does not account for any time the cards were hung up in the dispute process, but simply shows the number of days it took for the cards to moved between shipped and accepted.
So, the first row after the column headers shows trades sent from the US to the US. The maximum time (MAX) this has taken is 95 days. The numbered columns show the percentile values in days, so at the 50th percentile we see trades completed in 5 days. The minimum time (MIN) shows 0 which represents in person trades people have done. The Total Count is the number of items (cards, sealed products) used to calculate the delivery stats.
Have fun stats hounds -- let us know if you tease out anything interesting!
