Nobody can review running shoes on day one
A buyer who receives a pair of trail shoes on Tuesday can tell you the size was right and the colour matched the photo. That is not a review anyone reads.
The review that sells the next pair is written after fifty kilometres: whether the grip held on wet rock, whether the toe box rubbed, whether the sole is wearing evenly. That review cannot exist until weeks after delivery.
This makes Decathlon the clearest case on this site for why delivery-plus-a-fixed-delay beats every other trigger. Dispatch is meaningless. Delivery is the starting gun, not the finish line.
Seasonality decides whether the product has been used at all
Sport has a problem no other category has this badly: the gap between purchase and first use can be months. A ski jacket bought in October may not be worn until January. A wetsuit bought in March may sit until June.
A request timed purely on days-since-delivery will, for some products, reach a buyer who has genuinely not used the thing yet. There is no clever automation that fixes this — the honest answer is that seasonal equipment needs a longer delay than year-round equipment, and that is a decision made per product type when the automation is set up, not guessed at by a rule.
Performance reviews are the most persuasive reviews there are
The upside of the wait is that sports reviews, when they land, are unusually detailed. People who buy equipment care about it and enjoy talking about it. A cycling component review will tell you the rider's weight, their terrain and their previous component.
That level of specificity is worth far more than volume. Ten reviews of that quality outperform fifty that say "good product, fast delivery" — and you only get them by asking at a point where the buyer has something real to say.
What Merita does
We time each Decathlon request from that order's own delivery confirmation, with a delay set to suit what was actually bought, and send one message in the buyer's language through the marketplace's own buyer messaging. Nothing offered in return, one message per order, complaints and open returns excluded.