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We’ve been doing a weekly benchmark of online satisfaction with retail sites since November. We’ve conducted more than a half a million surveys at this point; more than 13,000 on Green Monday alone. Satisfaction is still down across the board. People are less satisfied with their online shopping experience this Green Monday than they were last Green Monday, just as they have been less satisfied every week this year when compared to last year. There are lots of studies showing that satisfaction (when using the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index) predict future financial success. Two of the metrics we are able to produce for any given company are “likelihood to purchase online in the future” and “likelihood to purchase offline in the future.” Both of these key success indicators are down.
It’s interesting…Comscore is making their seasonal predictions based on backward-looking data—financial data. They’d been saying we’d see a 3% increase in online sales year-over-year and after a great week last week, they’ve increased it to a prediction of 4%. I’m not sure how some of the other analysts and retail experts have been making their predictions, but I bet its based largely on backward looking data. Based on the only forward-looking metric (customer satisfaction), it looks like e-retailers are still in for a very rough ride.
What’s more, we see the gap between the best and the worst widening. According to both our data (satisfaction) and Comscore’s data (financial), the best are getting better and the worst are getting worse.
What do you think? Are we headed toward losing our “middle class” of online retailers?
Based on the comments I saw in our Black Friday survey people are disappointed with pricing. We've trained consumers to expect such low pricing for the holiday season anything over 50% off disappoints.