For some time now we have been soliciting feedback from customers at the end of the checkout process. Some of that has become invaluable.

10 being the best, please rate our site: Avg. 7.81
Without splitting this into multiple questions it can be perhaps a little ambiguous, but overall we feel customers get what we are asking. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this & the other bench markx over time as changes are made.

How would you rate our pricing? Avg. 8.30
Excluding all of the ratings of 5 or less, this average would actually be 9.2. We mention that because anyone who gives us a rating of 5 or lower on our pricing either A), has never actually compared our prices (online or off), or B), they believe the scale is from 10-1, and/or C), they wouldn’t be happy regardless of the price. You know what they say – some people just always want a little more. If we gave our crap away, undoubtedly a small minority of people would be upset with us for charging postage on said free crap. We could expand this into several posts, agh, but we digress…

What about our selection? Avg. 6.76
A more appropriate question here should be “would you actually purchase more items if they were available” because the lowest ratings are given by those purchasing the fewest items, or item, whereas people who have purchased multiple items tend to give much higher ratings. There is the possibility that they only ordered an item or 2 because of the selection, or lack thereof.

I wish we could easily extrapolate all of those points onto a chart so you could visualize this – there is a direct correlation between the two. All that said, we are listening, and we will be building out our catalog in 08′ more than ever – but the days of blindly throwing products against the wall to see what sticks, as others do, are over. There is no long tail that applies here. Certain stuff simply does not sell – sometimes because of a bad description or image, but generally because they just aren’t good products. What you (those giving us the bad ratings on our pricing?) don’t see is that in order to provide the prices & service that we do, we have to purchase massive quantities of these products. It is one thing to sit on a dozen of something that doesn’t sell, and another to sit on 24, or 48, or worse 72dozen.

And that brings us to the final, and most important survey question.

Was there anything you could not find?
Just as we do with the search logs, we also comb through the survey logs regularly to see what customers aren’t able to find (that we carry), and what they can’t find (because we don’t carry it). Case and point: Of the 4 items we added this morning, all have either been searched for and/or requested.

So, if there is something you would like us to carry, by all means get in touch by using the dropdown form (select – I think you should sell_____), or let us know by filling out our survey if placing an order. Or simply search for it and we will see it in time.