You may think your customers are satisfied. After all, you offer them a wider selection, better pricing and a more functional Web site than both of your nearest competitors. But a recent study about consumer satisfaction on the Web suggest that you may need to think more broadly about how elusive satisfaction can be—and what an important role it can play in the growth of your business, particularly if you market in more than one channel.
The study, issued in June by Decision Direct Research, a division of Millard Group, found that many e-commerce sites are failing to live up to consumers’ expectations in their operations. Decision Direct fields a quarterly online multichannel survey, with the participation of anywhere from 35 to 55 brand name marketers, and often focused on a single area of online selling. The most recent survey for the quarter ended May 31, 2005, centered on site navigation and usability, says Decision Direct vice president Lilliane LeBel. “It dealt with the online shopping experience as a whole, and with specific features such as the online search, the shopping cart, ease of locating products, the ease of shopping in general and the value to consumers of new shopping features,” she says.
The results show some areas where merchants’ sites need serious work, LeBel says. For example, out of the survey’s response pool of 50,000 consumers, 79% said they considered e-mail verification of an order to be an important feature in online shopping. But only 63% rated the sites they had shopped in the previous three months as “excellent” in providing that e-mail verification.
By the same token, 73% of Decision Direct’s respondents said they wanted to be able to view an online product in an accurate representation of the actual color they were interested in buying. But less than half—44%, to be exact—gave the sites they had shopped in the near past the highest marks for letting them see their purchase in their color.
And while 71% of consumers polled said they place a high value on being able to zoom in on a product photo to enlarge it, only 44% gave merchants an “excellent” rating for applying that feature.
Other important Web site attributes measured in the survey, and the percentage response that graded them “excellent” in execution, included:
* Item received matched online description (50%)
* Products described accurately online (45%)
* Inventory status readily available online (45%)
* Products shown clearly online (44%)
* Ability to find the desired product quickly (40%)
Since Decision direct has conducted versions of this quarterly survey since 200[?], it was able to track some of the consumer results. That’s not good news for online retailers. According to the most recent survey, the proportion of respondents rating as “excellent” merchants’ ability to produce “timely notification of order status” fell two percentage points over the last year to only 63%. And 49% of consumers rated as “excellent” merchants’ ability to tell them whether an item was in stock when they ordered it—a decline of four percentage points over the same quarter in 2004.
One notable area where multichannel retailers are doing better is in ease of returns, where excellent ratings increased from 42% in January 2004 to 46% in May 2005. Merchants also scored better this go-round than in the past in providing “reasonable shipping and handling” charges. Thirty-one percent of this quarter’s respondents rated them excellent, compared to 26% in January 2004.
Nevertheless, LeBel points out, the Decision Direct survey shows up many areas in which consumers are saying they value a feature but multichannel merchants, especially in their online incarnations, are failing to provide it. LeBel adds that as more consumers adopt e-commerce, they are being increasingly conditioned to expect the same features from all merchants that they find from the best Web practitioners—for example, being able to find out if an item is currently in stock or must be back-ordered.
“A consumer can go to Amazon.com and find out about a product, find out if it’s in stock, get some consumer reviews and even take a look inside at the table of contents,” LeBel notes. “To the average consumer, all online sites have the same technical capabilities and should be able to offer the same services.” And if your site doesn’t offer those functionalities, you’re risking disappointing potential buyers.
That performance gap becomes especially crucial in all matters pertaining to product information. Multichannel merchants, especially those coming from the catalog world, have long relied on lending their products a certain romance through creative use of text. But that won’t fly any more in the Internet age, LeBel says.
“Often merchants will show an item in turquoise and say, ‘Also available in crimson and butternut,’” LeBel says. “But people’s conception of those colors can be very different. People expect that you’ll be able to show them the item in those colors. And you’d better be sure that you show them in true colors, too, or you’re going to wind up disappointing customers.
Catalog merchants have a particular challenge in transporting their business to the Web, LeBel says. “People love shopping from catalogs because they’re able to find unique products they can’t get elsewhere,” she says. “As the Internet has expanded, and especially as the big-box retail companies like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond have exploded onto the Web, competition has increased, and catalogers over the last few years have fallen into the position of offering items that resemble everyone else’s. They’re no longer selling the products that can make them stand apart.” In January 2003, 48% of respondents told Decision Direct they went to a Web site because they could find unique items there; in the most recent survey, 32% said the same.
Product differentiation could be a real competitive edge for smaller multichannel merchants, LeBel says. “But I think they’ve been concentrating so much on keeping up with the competition that they’ve neglected to ask themselves, ‘Okay, what do we really want to be?’” Even offering the same products but with a different touch could help—for example, selling the same Adirondack patio chairs that Crate & Barrel offers, but with a distinctive hand-painted floral design.
“Merchandise has always been king for catalogers,” LeBel says. “It needs to fill that role for e-commerce sites as well. Multichannel merchants aren’t spending enough time asking what the customer really wants—what really will drive them to their sites.”
