Dive Brief:

• Customer satisfaction with e-retailers improved 5.1% from last year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, while satisfaction with brick-and-mortar retail categories fell or remained flat from last year.

• Most pure-play e-retailers, as with traditional physical retailers, fell from favor. Amazon remains the top web retailer, although satisfaction with it declined 2%.

• Consumers are happiest with department stores in the department and discount stores category, with Nordstrom at the top. Wal-Mart Stores was, like last year, at the bottom of the pack and dropped another 3 points this year. Drugstore retailers faltered too, though Rite Aid saw a big four-point improvement, and consumers were relatively pleased with pharmacy services overall.

Dive Insight:

This index gives a good snapshot of customer satisfaction with retailers, and it's not a pretty picture. For brick-and-mortar stores, unsurprisingly, a lot of that measure comes from shoppers’ experience with the state of stores and ease of checkout, which are clearly falling short. 

What is a surprise is that consumer satisfaction with e-commerce, which this year outpaced that of traditional retail, comes largely from shoppers’ experiences with traditional retailers’ websites. Without those, e-commerce satisfaction also declined.

But overall, this isn’t good news for retailers struggling to gain their footing even in an improving economy.

“Although there are several signs that the economy might finally take off, deteriorating customer satisfaction with retail suggests that consumer demand will not be where it needs to be,” says ACSI chairman and founder Claes Fornell. “This is also reaffirmed by weak sales for most retailers over the holiday season. Unless consumer spending picks up dramatically, we won’t see much – if any – increase in the pace of economic recovery.”