Survey unveils best and worst online retailers of 2013

Monday, December 23, 2013 - 13:21 by Graham Miller

A new report from ForeSee has examined the levels of customer satisfaction across all of the biggest e-commerce sites, establishing which companies created the best places for customers to carry out safe shopping online in the past 12 months, while also showing up retailers that did not make a good impression.

Each site was ranked out of 100 and, this year, three firms jockeyed for position at the top of the table. Argos, Amazon and Apple were all rated as offering the best user experience online, with a number of other companies also managing to improve their scores, when compared with last year's report.

Netflix jumped up to a rating of 71, while improvements were also registered at Ikea, which merited a mark of 76.

Those at the bottom of the pile include budget airline, RyanAir, which only scored 60. This is actually down from the 64 it achieved back in 2011, which shows that customers are actually less happy with its e-commerce service today than they were two years ago.

ForeSee spokesperson, Larry Freed, said that there was actually a slight drop in the average score for satisfaction this year, which is the first time that such a decline has been noted.

This is probably because customer expectation for safe shopping online is increasing and retailers need to play catch up with their services, to avoid disappointing users.

The top 10 retailers for online satisfaction included a number of high street chains, with Boots, M and S and Debenhams also featured.

This shows that the retailers which manage to master both the e-commerce market and bricks and mortar stores, will be better able to keep customers happy, even if Amazon remains a dominant online-only force, both in terms of sales and satisfaction.