E-Retailers Lead The Way In Customer-Satisfaction StudyE-Retailers Lead The Way In Customer-Satisfaction Study

Prevailing wisdom is that online customer service is bad and getting worse--but don't tell that to online retailers. Led by Amazon.com, E-retailers are outperforming all other E-commerce categories in the University of Michigan's latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report released this week.

Amazon.com scored a whopping 88% customer satisfaction rate, helping online retailers easily outpace rivals in the online brokerage, Internet auctions, and E-travel arenas. Online retailers scored a combined 84% satisfaction rate, compared with 78% for Internet auctions, 77% for E-travel sites, and 76% for online brokerages. Still, despite the laggards outside of retail, E-commerce sites collectively fared much better than their offline counterparts in the retail and financial--services industries, posting an average satisfaction rate of nearly 81%, about six percentage points higher than offline retailers and brokerages, and well above the national average of 74% for all categories online and off.

Amazon.com's closest competitor among online retailers who were scored independently was Barnesandnoble.com, which posted a customer satisfaction rate of 86%. Buy.com earned an 80% satisfaction rate, and 1-800-Flowers.com trailed with 76%.

There was no clear leader in the E-travel category: Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity were within two percentage points of each other, all within 1% of the E-travel average. And among online brokerages, the two most recognizable--Charles Schwab and E-Trade Financial--both posted below-average scores for their market segment, recording satisfaction rates of 75% and 71%.

Meanwhile, eBay continued to be the Amazon.com of the online auction market, scoring an 84% satisfaction rate, well above the category average. The two other online auctioneers tracked independently--uBid and Priceline.com--fared far worse, at 73% and 71%, respectively.

The annual study out of University of Michigan was conducted in cooperation with the American Society for Quality, along with an E-commerce partner, ForeSee Results.