A few weeks ago, I mentioned in this newsletter that we were finishing up our annual gift card report- where we buy a digital gift card from 100 different top-perforing retailers and evaluate the experience. The good news? The findings are now available. The bad news? Too many retailers are absolutely dropping the ball.

The evaluation was conducted exactly as it has been in years past for consistency: I purchased all of the gift cards and my partner Nikki received them all. We found that 81 out of the 100 retailers offered digital gift cards, down by only one retailer from 2015. In itself, this is hardly a headline. As everyone knows, you can’t win if you’re not even in the game, and the amount of top-performing brands willing to play remains stalled at too few.

However – 10 retailers were entirely unable to deliver on their digital gift card offering. The number of retailers in this position more than doubled from that of last year (4 in 2015), and that truly is shocking.

Five of these 10 had a purchase process so broken that we could not compete a purchase. RSR returned to each of these retailers several weeks later for a second attempt, only to find the breaks were not flukes: all still remained broken.

Worse still: 5 of these 10 are top brands – all of which proudly offer a gift card in their digital selling channels. They allowed a buyer to walk through the full purchase process, provided confirmation of a sale, and then simply did not deliver what was sold. Not only that: in each of these cases, RSR contacted the retailer after 3 days via phone to inquire what went wrong, only to have delivery still not take place.

Consider this: we are within the context of a controlled research project. In the “real world, ” if a purchaser were to buy from one of these brands, receive confirmation of their order, and no further communication from the person they sent a gift to, they might be well-inclined to think the recipient simply did not acknowledge their thoughtfulness.

In the report, we highlight exactly what went right – and what went wrong – in detail. We also rank each of the 100 retailers’ offerings, and make real suggestions for how everyone – even the winners – can do a better job going forward.

If you’d like to see the results, the full report is available here.