According to ForeSee’s annual Holiday E-Retailer Satisfaction Index, this year was Amazon’s biggest holiday season ever with more than 26.5 million items ordered worldwide on its peak day. Amazon has been making mobile a focal point of its strategy and is continuing to incorporating the medium into its day-to-day initiatives.

“These are not just fuzzy, feel-good metrics,” said Larry Freed, president/CEO of ForeSee. “Satisfaction is a metric that can predict the future success of a company.

“We were able to quantify the impact of a good customer experience on a retailer’s future financial results, and the impact is huge,” he said. “While most retail CEO’s will be evaluating the success of the holiday season based mainly on figures like sales and conversion, we found that a highly satisfied visitor to a retail site is 71 percent more likely to purchase online, 56 percent more likely to purchase offline, 65 percent more committed to the brand, and 61 percent more likely to return to the Web site.

“For companies who want to improve any of those figures, this data would certainly indicate that investments in the customer experience are a good bet.”

Holiday satisfaction
ForeSee surveyed more than 24,000 customers between Thanksgiving and Christmas, asking them to rate their satisfaction with the top 100 retailers.

For the second year in a row, Amazon’s score of 88 was the highest attained by any retailer in the study, per ForeSee.

According to ForeSee, Kindle Fire HD was the No. 1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.

Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for downloads from Amazon’s digital ecosystem, which includes movies, television shows, music, magazines, books, audiobooks, applications and games.

To date, Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle hold the top four spots on the Amazon worldwide best seller charts since launch.

Furthermore, Cyber Monday 2012 was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales worldwide.

ForeSee also found that the Amazon Appstore for Android selection nearly tripled in 2012 over 2011 and sales of apps and games during the holiday period alone were up more than 250 percent over the same period last year.

“There were two surprises in the report,” Mr. Freed said. “First, that Amazon continues to dominate.

“We used to consider 80 the threshold for excellence, but Amazon is setting a new bar with their consistently high scores,” he said. “This methodology has been used to evaluate online and offline companies for twenty years, and there are very, very few companies that do so well so consistently.

“Amazon is setting a new standard. The second surprise was that satisfaction with Apple has dipped. Apple is one of our perennial high performers. They have a very loyal customer base and a strong history of a customer-centric culture. Their stumble shows even the biggest companies have to stay vigilant.”

Consumer shopping
According to ForeSee, Amazon customers purchased more than one toy per second on mobile devices.

Top purchases included copies of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy by E.L. James, “Bond 50” Blu-ray sets purchased and Just Dance 4 games.

The report further proves that Amazon is not just a key player in the mobile space, but one to watch out for.

“Amazon has had a customer-centric culture since day one, often foregoing short-term profits in favor of long-term investments that improved the customer experience and paid long-term dividends,” Mr. Freed said.

“They are also the only company I know of with a CEO who is so involved and in tune with the customer experience,” he said. “ I don’t know of any other company whose CEO writes customers a letter every year thanking them for these kinds of awards.”

Final Take
Rimma Kats is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York