A new survey of consumer satisfaction at the top 40 retail Web sites this holiday season found that Netflix, the online video rental giant, scored highest for the second year in a row.
The survey by the research firm ForeSee Results found customer satisfaction for Netflix at an impressive 86 percent, up from 84 percent last holiday season. Amazon.com, the top ranked site in sales, was second in customer satisfaction at 84 percent, also up 2.4 percent from last year's score of 82.
LLBean.com and QVC.com tied for third place with customer satisfaction scores of 80 percent, unchanged from last year.
Apple.com, OldNavy.com and Quixtar.com (which sells the popular Nutri-lite supplement, among other things) were in a three-way tie for 5th through 7th places with 79 percent scores, followed by HPShopping.com and another tech shopping site, Newegg.com, tied for 8th-9th with 78 percent satisfaction. Barnes & Noble's, Dell's and Williams-Sonoma's Web sites snagged 10th-12th at 77 percent satisfaction.
The 40 sites covered by the survey were those with the top sales volume in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Larry Freed, president and chief executive of ForeSee Results, said the customer satisfaction scores are based on responses from 10,500 people surveyed between Thanksgiving and December 19. Specifically, the scores were determined by respondents' answers to three questions about eligible sites they had visited (whether or not they actually bought something): How satisfied they were overall, how well the site met their expectations, and how well it compared to what they thought an ideal site would be.
While ForeSee's survey didn't address offline retailers, he says it uses the same methodology that the University of Michigan uses to evaluate a wide range of online and offline merchants. A comparison shows that generally, Web retailers tend to score higher than their brick-and-mortar brethren," Freed says.
"It's not a great surprise," Freed says, noting that the convenience of Web shopping--including the ability to easily compare prices at several retailers--cannot be matched by real-world shopping. And Web retailers are becoming ever more sophisticated with effective use of new imaging technologies and user reviews.
However Freeman says he was pleasantly surprised to note that several big brick-and-mortar chains significantly improved the customer satisfaction scores for their web counterparts. "Sears, J.C. Penney, Old Navy and Target all saw huge increases," he said, adding that the numbers suggest these companies are finally leveraging the advantages of multichannel retailing. "There's going to be some tough competition going forward for the pure plays [online-only retailers]."
You can check out the entire list in the BusinessWire news release.
