Christmas may be over, but Amazon still has good reason to be celebrating holiday cheer. For the eighth year running, the site has been ranked at the top when it comes to customer satisfaction during the gift-giving season, achieving the highest retail score ever in an annual survey for the second year in a row. As if that wasn’t enough, the company also celebrated a record-shattering holiday season with more than 300 items being sold per second at its peak.
Analytics company ForeSee recently released the results of its annual Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index survey. Amazon came out on top in the survey, which draws its findings from more than 24,000 customer surveys collected from online shoppers in the United States during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, matching last year’s record high score of 88 (out of a possible 100). Competitor Apple fell from last year’s second place to well outside the top five altogether in 2012, achieving its lowest score in four years. Dell also dropped to 77 points, falling three points shy of last year’s score.
“At this point, Amazon has been dominant for so long and has such a history of focusing on the customer, its hard to imagine anyone else coming close,” said Larry Freed, ForSee president and CEO, in the report. “Companies should emulate Amazon’s focus on the customer, which is clearly linked to superior revenues over the years.”
Superior revenues indeed. Coinciding with the ForeSee Index announcement, Amazon has revealed that 2012 was the company’s best holiday season to date, with Black Friday orders toppling a staggering 26.5 million. According to a press release, Amazon’s Kindle Fire was the best-selling item throughout the holiday season for the second year running, officially becoming the company’s best-selling, most-gifted and most wished for product ever. Unsurprisingly, that meant that people wanted content for the device as soon as they received it, with Christmas Day being named as the company’s biggest day ever for digital downloads on record. App and game sales during the holiday season also rose, with a 250-percent increase compared with the same period in 2011.
Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezos released a short statement in response to the news.
“We are grateful to customers for once again ranking us at the top of the ForeSee customer satisfaction survey and for choosing to shop at Amazon this holiday,” Bezos said. “On behalf of Amazon employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and the best for the coming year.”
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