Navigating the amazon

I was reading in WARC News this morning that amazon is among the online retailers receiving the highest satisfaction scores from UK consumers.

This is according to a recent survey from ForeSee who surveyed almost 10,000 respondents, and found that "highly satisfied" shoppers registered a 57% improvement in their commitment to specific retailers.

This is obviously great for online retail and I'm personally not surprised that amazon do so well. In the early days of online I found it difficult to accept that there was no telephone support but the e-mail system amazon have in place as well as direct order tracking via the Post Office is great and effective. Or perhaps it is just that like my fellow netizens I am more used to and confident in a system that has finally clicked with me!

John Lewis also do well in the ForeSee survey and I was again reminded of amazon when thinking of the 'never knowingly undersold' slogan. Having bought an item from amazon - and yes it arrived without delay - I got a follow-up e-mail to say that it had subsequently been reduced online and they had paid an amount equivalent to the saving directly back to my credit card. I didn't know about the price reduction so didn't need to ask and certainly didn't need to 'make a claim' with all the bureaucratic red tape that phrase conjures up.

If you run a transparent operation online you have nowhere to hide and it never gets personal. I used to think that the lack of a real person in retail sales was a problem but, as ForeSee are demonstrating, it's actually its biggest advantage.

Tesco: every second counts

I was reading a piece about Tesco on Yahoo! Finance this morning.

As part of its Clubcard scheme where customers earn points on supermarket purchases, including non-food items, it had launched its Big Clubcard Voucher Exchange back in November. Customers had the chance over the next four weeks of doubling their points by exchanging special vouchers before the closing date of 5th December.

Tesco not only made great play of the vouchers being applicable to a much wider range of items but that vouchers could also be exchanged online. They expected a steady but even flow of voucher exchanges over the four weeks of the scheme. Of course, given the sense of retail omnipresence these days, many shoppers left it until the last minute (literally) causing long queues in supermarkets, slow online response times and eventually the collapse of the entire Tesco website.

As in my last post on online shopping a lot of shoppers today perceive that online servers are uniformly available 24/7. They're not. Online shopping processing speeds depend on online traffic - you just don't have to try and park the car first. If £831,000 can be spent online in one minute how could Tesco not have planned for a possible shopping peak at the expiry date of its voucher scheme?

Perhaps they will learn some lessons about digital before running the scheme again, or is it just basic sales promotion? As they say, every second counts.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Did you see the piece in netimperative regarding yesterday's online shopping sales?

According to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) member Retail Decisions (ReD) we had our busiest online shopping day ever yesterday (Monday 6th December 2010 will now be forever known as Mega Monday) and, at 13.15 our 'busiest minute' when £831,000 was clicked through online shopping carts.

According to IMRG over half the population of the UK now shops online. Their forecast of online sales to reach £6.4 billion in December alone looks vulnerable - in the right direction!

As Supertramp asked during mid 'Seventies economic despair: Crisis? What Crisis?