The Wall Street Journal maintains a great blog on holiday sales news that especially during this merry time is an excellent resource for tracking how online retailers are faring. Yesterday it reported on an interesting ForeSee Research study.

Netflix, Amazon.com, LL Bean, and QVC.com ranked best in customer satisfaction during the holiday season, according to ForeSee Results’ Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index. Ranking at the bottom of the index: CompUSA, Costco, and CDW.com. The study found that department stores — including the sites for J.C. Penney, Sears and Target — scored huge improvements, and that in general, most retailers scored higher than last year. Overall, customers were more satisfied with apparel Web sites than with mass merchants or electronics retailers.

American Customer Satisfaction IndexAmazon continues to lead the pack of online retailers in customer satisfaction (disregarding Netflix for a moment as more of a service provider then traditional merchant). There is no consolidated list of marketplaces available (eBay is tracked as an internet auction provider) but that is pretty easy to create using published American Customer Satisfaction Index data and the WSJ post:

Marketplaces Customer Satisfaction Ranking (2006 data unless otherwise indicated)

  1. Amazon (87 — 2005 score)
  2. eBay (81 — 2005 score)
  3. Yahoo! (76)
  4. uBid (73 — 2005 score)
  5. Overstock.com (71)

For good measure I am also including below satisfaction scores for the leading search engines although scores for Microsoft and Yahoo! should be taken with a grain of salt because of their big product portfolio.

  1. Google (81)
  2. Yahoo! (76)
  3. Microsoft (73)
  4. Ask.com (71)

The simplified implication for online merchants is of course to take a good look at the top-rated channels as that is where the buyers are flocking.

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