Jan 12, 2006 6:04 AM, By Andrew Scott

As the curtain closed on the holiday shopping season, new figures indicate that consumers are 4% less satisfied with the online shopping experience than they were earlier in 2005.

According to ForeSee Results, Inc., an Ann Arbor-MI-based market research firm, an index measuring customers' overall satisfaction fell from 76.7 to 73.5 on its 100-point scale.

"The downward trend is due to consumers' increased expectations during the holiday season, a much larger influx of infrequent visitors that may not know how to navigate a site and shipping costs, and the unavailability of prominent items like the Xbox 360 due to low inventory," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee.

During the season retailers faced the delicate balance of serving the needs and meeting expectations of two diverse online shopping audiences: regular customers and first-time or infrequent customers.

Freed said he expects retailers will give more thought on how to make Web sites more user-friendly so that newcomers won't move on.

Customer satisfaction was 10% less for infrequent online shoppers than the regulars. And the likelihood that infrequent shoppers would return to sites is 21% less than frequenters.

The challenge for online retailers is to convert possible one-time shoppers to loyal customers, Freed said. Also, declining online shopping satisfaction affects not only online revenues, but in-store revenues as well since Web sites are a strong influencer to shop at retailers' brick and mortar locations.

Only four retailers' sites out of 40 top retail Web sites scored over 80 on the scale during the spring 2005 to December 2005 period. They include Netflix.com, Amazon.com, LLBean.com and QVC.com. The lowest scoring sites were CompUSA.com, Kmart.com and Sears.com.

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