Study: Lands’ End Most Customer Focused
By George Anderson
Lands’ End has been named the winner of the first annual Online Retail Study for Customer Focused Excellence.
The study sponsored by the marketing services boutique, Future Now, Inc. used independent mystery shoppers to “analyze how customer-focused the retailers’ websites were once a customer identified the product they wanted to purchase.”
According to a company release, “Mystery shoppers searched for 42 different data points across 13 categories to find out which retailer’s website was the most focused on meeting their customer’s needs once they had identified the product to be purchased. Each data point was assigned a weighted score, totaling 100 points.”
When the tallies were complete, the top 12 customer-focused online retailers were:
1. Landsend.com 81%
2. Amazon.com 77%
3. LLBean.com 73%
4. Bluenile.com 72%
5. QVC.com 71%
6. Nordstrom.com 70%
7. BestBuy.com 69%
8. Newport-News.com 68%
9. Sears.com 68%
10. Mondera.com 67%
11. Macys.com 65%
12. Neimanmarcus.com 65%
Moderator’s Comment: Were there any surprises for you in Future Now’s rankings? What services/features do you think consumers expect when they shop on
a Web site?
Here are some of the key findings of the mystery shoppers used in this research.
- Twenty-five percent said the retailer’s default font size were too small to read.
- Thirty-seven percent offered free shipping.
- Forty-five percent offered information on a product’s availability.
- Seventy percent provide the cost of shipping early in the checkout process.
- Forty-three percent did not offer a telephone payment option.
To download a .pdf file of the Online Retail Study for Customer Focused Excellence go to http://www.futurenowinc.com/.
[George
Anderson – Moderator]