• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, May 11, 2009

A new study finds that consumers are losing their enthusiasm for Internet shopping, and that customer satisfaction with e-tail is down 3% from last year.

The study, the fifth annual customer service ranking from ForeSee Results, finds that the average satisfaction level of the top 100 e-commerce sites slipped to 73 out of 100, with more than half of the sites registering decreases in customer satisfaction. Only a fifth showed any gains.

Netflix held steady at No. 1, with a score of 86, and Amazon hung on to its No.2 spot. But big losers included Apple.com, which fell five points and is now behind both HP and Dell; CVS.com, NeimanMarcus.com, Talbots.com, WilliamsSonoma.com, Overstock.com, Nike.com, and QVC.com.

The stakes are pretty high, according to its research, with a single point increase in online satisfaction translating to a 9% increase in revenues.

Part of the waning satisfaction comes from higher expectations, says Larry Freed, ForeSee's president and CEO. "You don't go into a restaurant or department store every year and expect it to be better than last year. But shoppers do expect a certain amount of innovation from Web sites. Over the years, there have been plenty of things that enhanced online shopping -- better search capabilities, alternative ways to pay, customer reviews, better graphics. But innovation is in a kind of plateau right now."

A second factor, he says, is that the rough economy has consumers researching purchases as never before, which takes some of the satisfaction out of the process. "You've spent so much time learning about all the products available, what you finally settle on may be a little bit of a letdown," he says.

Interestingly, sites that gained tended to be brick-and-mortar retailers, he says, including Kohls.com, Peapod.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, Costco.com, VictoriasSecret.com, and HomeDepot.com. "The big innovation in the coming holiday season will be breakthroughs in multichannel selling -- we'll see these companies doing much more with in-store pickups, for example."

The survey found that the Web site for the Internal Revenue Service scored a 73, which Freed says means it beat out half of all the shopping sites. He attributes the gains to more people doing their own taxes because of the recession, and finding the site easy to use, and the site's efforts to make it easier for consumers to track last year's rebate checks.