Amazon rakes the number one spot in a survey that shows customers’ preference when shopping or buying items online. On the opposite end is JC Penny Co Inc, which has seen a significant drop in customer satisfaction for a major online retailer this Christmas season, according to the survey released on Thursday.

Other online stores suffering from poor customer feedback on the survey are RueLaLa.com and Gilt.com. The survey was conducted by ForeSee’s Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index.

Foresee measures customer satisfaction for firms including retailers and online e-commerce sites.

Foresee’s president and chief executive officer Larry Freed said: “The importance of satisfying them and giving a great consumer experience is going to pay back huge dividends in terms of profitability for these retailers.”

Amazon has been a consistent performer in the index for the past eight years because of its user-friendly website and a wide range of merchandise offerings.

“They’ve really done a great job in setting the standard for everybody else,” said Freed, praising Amazon’s effort.

Amazon’s score of 88 out of 100 is the highest, followed by LLBean.com’s 85, which has seen an increase of 4 points from a year ago. Gilt.com and Fingerhut.com are neck to neck at 72, the lowest score.

Freed said that a score of 80 for a site is considered strong.

JC Penny’s score of 83 a year earlier dropped to 78.

“They’ve struggled a lot in their stores as they’ve tried to reinvent themselves a bit and that’s carried over a little bit to the website,” Freed said of JC Penny.

ForeSee’s satisfaction survey also showed scores for other retailers and companies including Apple’s drop from 83 to 80, and Dell’s 77 from 80.

Apple’s popularity brought with it more products, which also makes the site becoming more difficult to navigate, according to Freed. He said that improving the functionality of the site would greatly boost Apple’s satisfaction score.

The biggest retailer in the U.S., Wal-Mart Stores Inc, saw its score drop from 79 to 78, as it strives to boost growth of its online sales. Its competitor, Target Corp scored 79, an increase of 3 points from last year’s 76. Target is struggling to capitalize on its website after it took control over it from Amazon.

Other flash sale sites with lower scores are trying to grow beyond the premise of flash sales, a strategy, Freed noted, that offers a limited amount of discounted prices for items at certain times.

“It works for some kinds of consumers, it’s not going to work for every kind of consumer,” Freed added. “Their models today are going to work and they’re going to have a chance to be successful, but at the end of the day it’s not the right answer for everybody.”

The data of ForeSee was taken from more than 24,000 surveys gathered from users of websites of the top 100 largest online stores, a figure up from 40 retailers during the previous years. The survey was conducted between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

source: reuters

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