 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3729751
By Michelle Megna February 22, 2008 U. Michigan Study: Amazon and E-Commerce Winners Customer satisfaction with the e-commerce sector hit an all-time high, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released this week by the University of Michigan with e-commerce partner ForeSee Results. "The improvement in e-commerce is impressive, given the downward trend in the national ACSI," says Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan and author of The Satisfied Customer. The Index includes more than 200 companies in more than 40 industries and slipped 4 percent to 74.9 in its second consecutive decline. "E-commerce is the only sector to improve this quarter, and in fact reaches an all-time high in customer satisfaction while other some industries start to struggle." "Against a backdrop of weakening consumer spending and talk about recession, e-commerce will continue to be a bright spot for multichannel companies," Larry Freed, an online customer satisfaction expert and president and CEO of ForeSee Results said in a statement. "Companies have to excel in their online channel: survival in this economy depends on customer satisfaction, because switching costs are low and an alternative is just a mouse click away." Online retail is the highest scoring industry in the fourth quarter, scoring 83 for a second consecutive year and surpassing the offline retail sector (74.2) by 12 percent. All of the measured companies in the e-tail industry are among the top 10 highest-scoring companies in all of ACSI. E-tail stalwart Amazon.com ties its all-time high, up 1 point to 88, leading both the e-retail industry and the e-commerce sectors, says the study. The silver and bronze for online retail go to two new companies to the Index: Newegg debuts at 87 and Netflix at 84. Amazon has the second-highest score in the ACSI (trailing only Heinz) and surpasses other customer-pleasing companies such as Apple and Southwest Airlines. The company's dedication to the customer experience is paying off in terms of customer satisfaction, as evidenced by its biggest fourth quarter revenues ever, according to the report. ACSI merged the auction category with online retail to reflect the increasing overlap and competition between the two. EBay moves up a point to 81, but it has been fairly stagnant over the last few years, failing to come up with the true business innovations that have catapulted Amazon up 5 percent since 2004. FastCommerce Signs Up Google Products FastCommerce.com recently announced the introduction of Google Products as a part of a larger strategy of giving online businesses access to a growing number of new marketplaces beyond eBay. E-commerce technologies that are market neutral enable the small business entrepreneur to compete in an array of marketing venues, according to the company. FastCommerce.com now automatically publishes its merchants' product catalogs to Google products and offers both Google Check Out and PayPal. Migrating from ZenCart to CRE Loaded Chain Reaction Ecommerce, makers of the open-source Web store application CRE Loaded, just released the ZenCart to CRE Loaded 6.2 database converter. This tool converts the database of an existing ZenCart 1.3.7 store into a file that can be merged with a new CRE Loaded 6.2 installation using the "Restore" button from the CRE Loaded Admin Backup tool, according to the company. Users must have a working ZenCart 1.3.7 shopping cart and a separate working CRE Loaded store and be coded for Linux-based servers, and the company says, the process may require some code adjustments to run on Windows-based servers. "So many people move up to CRE Loaded from ZenCart each day that we realized we should have a tool to ease the migration process. We released an osCommerce to CRE Loaded converter a couple of months ago and it was a big hit, so this was a logical progression," Chain Reaction Ecommerce CEO,Michael Valverde said in a statement. Here's how it works: Users can upload the convert.php to their existing ZenCart store catalog folder. Then point their browser to the file (as in, for example, www.somestore.com/convert.php) being careful to ensure the folder being pointed to is writable and the new file will be created in that folder. Then click "Convert" and download the file created and upload it to your CRE Loaded store placing it in the admin/backup folder. Finally, log into the CRE Loaded admin and use the backup/restore program to restore the new file to your new store. Both database conversion tools are available free here. Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
|
| Go to page: Prev 1 2 |
|
|
Legal Notices, Licensing, Permissions, Privacy Policy.
Advertise | Newsletters | Shopping | E-mail Offers | Freelance Jobs 
