For Those With Retail Trouble, the Problems Worsen Online

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Research firm ForeSee released its customer satisfaction ratings for the shopping season — its Holiday E-retail Satisfaction Index. The e-commerce ratings mirror, in most cases, the states of the parent companies’ revenue.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) ranked first. That makes sense. Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce company. Without excellent customer service, it would not hold that position for long. Amazon’s revenue has grown at a rate near 50% for the past two quarters.

The bottom of the list is littered with some companies that have deeply offended customers in some way. Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) is there. It raised rates and confused its subscribers with a jumble of explanations. The Gap (NYSE: GPS) is near the bottom as well. Gap’s image probably was not helped when it announced that it would shutter 21% of its flagship stores in the U.S. The news almost certainly undermined employee morale as well. This should have spilled over into customer service problems.

The bottom of the list also contained some firms that have to improve customer relations if they are to recover from terrible sales problems that have persisted for years. All three office suppliers fall toward the troubled part of the list: Office Depot (NYSE: ODP), Staples (NASDAQ: SPLS) and Office Max (NYSE: OMX). And of course, as should be expected — Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD) is there.

Customers probably see company e-commerce efforts through the same lens as efforts and satisfaction in bricks-and-mortar operations. That shows up in the ForeSee report.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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