Shopzilla Solutions

Shopzilla Consumer Insights FAQ

Survey Programme

Smiley Scale and the Customer Certification Program


How much does the survey program cost?
Each survey program is created to meet your needs.  The cost will vary depending on the customerisation and reporting options that you require.

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What is involved in placing the survey on my site?
In order to begin data collection you must insert three lines of HTML code on your order receipt page (i.e., the page after an order has been successfully submitted). This code provides an invitation for your buyers to fill out an evaluation form immediately after they complete their purchase. We estimate that placing this code on your site should take less than five minutes. Please note that the web survey is only presented to those buyers who choose to participate by clicking on our invitation button. Your employees are not permitted to complete your surveys.


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What’s the difference between buyer and non-buyer surveys?
The buyer survey gathers data on the customers who make a purchase on your site, while the non-buyer survey is targeted at visitors who use your site but do not complete a transaction. There are two parts to the buyer survey – a point of sale survey and a fulfillment survey a couple of weeks later. The non-buyer survey is a single survey that changes depending on the stage at which the visitor leaves – after browsing, after placing items in the cart, or during the checkout process.

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What is the point of sale survey?
The point of sale (POS) survey collects customer feedback on the critical performance metrics required to stay competitive in the ecommerce business. The POS survey collects feedback on the first part of the online ordering process - placing the order. Specific metrics addressed are:

  • Service dimensions for placing an online order
  • Overall satisfaction and loyalty
  • Online buying experience across the web, with competitors and from your site
  • Referral sources, incentives and website features influencing the purchase
  • Demographic information

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What is the fulfillment survey?
The fulfillment (FF) survey collects feedback on the second part of the online ordering process - delivery and post-purchase support. Specific metrics addressed are:

  • Service dimensions for delivery and post-purchase support
  • Overall satisfaction and loyalty
  • On-time delivery
  • Return processing
  • Customer support
  • Turnaround tactics for low repurchase intent customers

Customers may complete the FF survey only after they have completed a POS survey. A link to the FF survey is sent via email shortly after the product delivery date the customer indicated on the POS survey.

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Does the survey interfere with my customers' ability to complete their purchases?
No. Our survey invitation is served on the receipt page after a sale is completed, or after a customer has already left your website.

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Do I have to offer the survey to all my customers?
No. You choose the frequency of the survey invite and the percentage of customers that receive it. We can offer you advice on these numbers to make sure you are get the most useful and statistically relevant data.

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How do I receive and make sense of the results?
You can receive a daily Vital Mail by email, which gives you ongoing performance metrics in 17 key criteria and compares them against the previous week’s results. Also sent to you is the daily or weekly Comment Classifier file, rounding up customers comments from the open questions. These comments can also be sent by email to you individually as they are received, allowing you to reply directly to the customer.

The monthly Executive Summary Report takes all criteria and gives you scores for each, along with the average score from a selection of other retailers in the same ecommerce space. This allows you to benchmark your scores against your direct competitors and readily identify strengths and weaknesses.

24/7 access to this data is also available online, where you can filter and sort results in a variety of ways and pull the exact reports that are most important to your research and marketing goals.

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How long do the surveys take to answer?
The surveys are mostly made up of closed questions, so each should only take a few minutes. Only the most important questions are mandatory.

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Why do the surveys use closed questions and a ten-point scale?
Closed questions are quick and easy to answer and encourage the largest amount of respondents. They also provide a baseline that makes it easy to compare results week by week. The ten-point scale is familiar to most people, and because there is no middle point, it forces people to take a positive or negative view and so reduces non-committal responses. There is at least one open-ended question on each survey, giving you some qualitative data and allowing respondents to offer opinions that may not be covered by the standard questions.

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Can I add my own questions to the survey?
Yes. If you have a particular question you want to add to the survey, we can do this as an additional service. Other customisation options are available – call your account manager or contact us for details.

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What is the Smiley Scale?
The Smiley Scale appears on all our consumer websites and is a simple and intuitive way to visualise a lot of research data about a store's capabilities. This is so our customers can easily pick out good merchants when shopping on our site.

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What is the Customer Certification Program?
Shopzilla's Customer Certification Program is used by thousands of retailers every day to promote, track and improve their customer satisfaction performance. The information you gather from your customers provides you with the critical performance metrics required to say competitive in the ecommerce marketplace.

The aggregations of your customer surveys as part of the Consumer Insights programme are displayed to shoppers in the form of an intuitive and consumer friendly Smiley Scale. This scale demonstrates your commitment to providing quality products and services and allows you to stand out from the competition.

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How do I become a Customer Certified Merchant?
To become a Customer Certified Merchant you must meet the following criteria:

  • You must actively serve the point of sale survey.
  • You must have 20 or more completed fulfillment surveys during the ratings period.
  • A merchant may not have a red Smiley in the following five ratings metrics: overall rating; would shop here again; on-time delivery; customer support; product met expectations.

This translates roughly into a monthly volume of approximately 250-300 orders.

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What are the benefits of being a Customer Certified Merchant?
Aside from the invaluable and actionable customer data you receive through the Consumer Insights programme, reaching Customer Certified Merchant status will see you highlighted on our shopping sites as an exceptional retailer, use of the Bizrate Customer Certified badge on your website so you can shout about your success, and favourable positioning in the search results of our shopping comparison sites.

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What does "Not Yet Rated" mean?
"Not Yet Rated" means that we are in the process of evaluating the store but have not yet collected enough customer reviews to issue a rating. We require a minimum of 20 surveys to be collected during the ratings period to ensure we have a statistically significant rating of a store's performance and not the opinion of just a handful of customers. As soon as enough valid reviews have been collected, a rating will be calculated and displayed.

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What does "Being Re-Rated" mean?
Retailers can be re-rated for a variety of reasons, including significant changes to a store's site or operations, or detection of a significant amount of suspicious reviews or other unusual activity that makes us question that the prior ratings were unreliable.
Once enough valid reviews have been gathered, a new rating will be calculated and displayed.

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What is the number of reviews?
The number of reviews is the total number of individual consumer reviews that we have collected for a particular retailer. The more people who have reviewed a store, the more statistically reliable the ratings are. For instance, if 50,000 people say a store is great in on-time delivery, it's a little different than if 3 people say so. We do not consider anything less than 20 reviews collected during the ratings period to be a statistically relevant number and therefore do not post scores for retailers below this threshold of reviews. These stores are clearly designated as "Not Yet Rated".

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How are your ratings calculated?
We take great care to ensure that we have the most rigorous and reliable and up-to-date ratings possible. Accordingly, we take the latest feedback from our survey network and combine it with the latest feedback from Bizrate members to arrive at a store rating.

The equation that determines each retailer’s rating is calculated as follows for each dimension of service:


 
Of course, since retailer ratings often change over time – the Christmas period is not the same as summer – time is also a very important element in our calculations. Accordingly, we only use data from the ratings period when performing the calculations to arrive at a rating. That means that the a retailer rating is always current. The stores participating in our Customer Certified programme generally have the most reliable ratings because they are allowing us to proactively and continuously solicit feedback from customers. This means the Customer Certified program truly represents the "gold standard" of customer satisfaction ratings of retailers. To find online retailers in this programme, look for the "Customer Certified" medal on their site.

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How do you stop ratings manipulations and fraud?
We've been in the business of rating online stores since 1996. Through the years we've put in place many ways of detecting and eliminating fraudulent ratings. Of course, for obvious reasons, we don't like to detail exactly what we look for and how we detect fraud, but suffice it to say that we use a combination of sophisticated mathematical algorithms, large numbers of reviews from a variety of sources that are checked against each other for consistency, and powerful analytic tools and systems to make sure that we are on the leading edge of detecting and eliminating systematic fraud from our ratings.

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Do stores pay to be listed in the store ratings section?
No. To maintain the highest possible levels of objectivity and independence in our ratings, stores are not charged for evaluation. We are dedicated to providing consumers with unbiased information to enable make more informed and confident online buying decisions, and to providing retailers with accurate, reliable data that can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses and make improvements where necessary.

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