ph the touch the feel, the barriers to entry
January 18, 1999
Holiday Use Sours a Few Consumers on Web Shopping
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
mid post-Christmas giddiness about the stellar holiday drawing power of Web merchants like Amazon.com and portals like
America Online, a survey to be released today found that while record numbers of Americans tried Internet shopping, they
were not always happy with their experiences.
Consumers who expressed satisfaction with their online shopping excursions dropped by 14 percentage points from six months
earlier, although the vast majority -- 74 percent -- still considered it a positive experience, according to the survey, which was
conducted by Jupiter Communications, a new-media research company in New York.
Jupiter's results are based on a questionnaire filled out by 2,369 households that use the
Internet. In about 44 percent of those households, someone bought something online during
November and/or December.
The households were selected from a group of 4,000 homes randomly chosen by Jupiter's
research partner, National Family Opinion, to reflect the total online population in the United
States. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus two percentage points.
The data strongly suggested that the Web had evolved in consumers' perception from an
exciting novelty to an alternative means of shopping, with benefits and problems all its own.
Still, the No. 1 reason consumers voiced dissatisfaction was a problem as old as retailing: the
product they desired was out of stock. Unhappiness about high shipping costs was a close
second.
By contrast, concerns about merchants protecting credit card numbers, previously the single largest concern about purchasing
merchandise online, ranked fourth among reasons for survey participants' unhappiness.
Similarly, discontent with online merchants' return policies and their communication problems with customers ranked in the bottom
half of the list of consumer complaints.
Shoppers were also surprisingly tolerant of technical mishaps. Asked whether poor performance affected their site use, 51 percent
responded "no," and only 9 percent said that such glitches would cause them to stop using a site permanently.
When a site had problems, however, 28 percent said that they then sought out an alternative,
which they continued to stick with.
Nicole Vanderbilt, a senior analyst with Jupiter, said online merchants should view these deserters
as "a warning sign."
"There has been a lot of hype about immense growth on the Web," Ms. Vanderbilt said. "What
retailers need to be careful of now is taking that for granted. Nineteen ninety-eight brought in a lot
of new dollars, but they are going to have to play the game very carefully to maintain their momentum."
Several other research firms have also recently released studies on consumer Internet purchasing patterns during the holiday
season.
Infobeads, a unit of Ziff-Davis Inc., the publisher of PC Week magazine, conducted telephone interviews with 1,000 adults
selected at random. Aaron Goldberg, the company's executive vice president, said his firm found that of those users who had
actually bought something, 55 percent rated the experience as "easy" and 43 percent said that they had saved money while
shopping on the Web.
But a not-yet-published survey suggests still another potential area of concern for online merchants. Tomorrow, Ernst & Young
will release a survey of 1,300 consumers and 125 online retailers, which found that 57 percent of consumers were visiting Web
sites only to research products. They did their actual buying later in a store or by phone or fax. |
