Consumers expecting more from e-tailers
January 31, 2008
Cambridge, Mass.—Though they appear to be winning the battle for consumers' dollars, this is not the time for e-tailers to start slacking off when it comes to customer service, a new survey shows.
In its third annual Holiday Shopping: Online Customer Experience Survey,
Allurent Inc. reports that 67 percent of consumers said their expectations about the quality of the online shopping experience has increased since the 2006 holiday shopping season.
The top reason for the increased expectations was constantly improving technology (66 percent).
Other reasons cited were: consistent advertising of Web sites by retailers, which makes shoppers think they should be investing more in improving the sites (46 percent); consumers having high-speed bandwidth and wanting sites to present products in a way that takes advantage of this (41 percent); and expecting sites to be innovative, like Google Maps and Facebook (29 percent).
In addition, 40 percent of consumers surveyed said a frustrating online experience would make them less likely to shop at a retailer's physical store, while 60 percent reported a negative online experience affects their opinion of a retailer's brand and 80 percent won't return to a site after having a bad experience.
Online features that ranked high among survey participants included a perpetual shopping cart (rated as an important feature by 74 percent of respondents) and a one-page checkout system (70 percent).
A total of 721 consumers took the 2007 holiday shopping online survey.
The survey was conducted in January by Zoomerang and sponsored by Allurent, a Cambridge, Mass.-based e-commerce company.
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