A new study has been published that shows Amazon as king of the hill among online retailers. The study, conducted by ChangeWave Research, looked at the planned online shopping activities of over 2,600 North American shoppers.
According to the survey data, 46% of respondents in January 2012 said that they planned to make home entertainment purchases at Amazon in the next 90 days. That’s a 10% jump from January 2011, when only 36% said they planned to shop at Amazon in next 90 days.
The study also compared Amazon to other online retailers, and the results are surprising. Amazon beat Costco, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target by enormous margins. Twenty percent of respondents said they planned to spend more money at Amazon in the next 90 days than they had in the last 90 days, while 11% said they would spend less, 49% said they would spend the same, and only 20% said they would spend no money at all. Costco was in a far distant second: 3% said they would spend more, 4% said less, 16% said they would spend the same, and 77% of respondents said they would spend no money at all.
Interestingly, owning a Kindle fire seems to make customers more likely to spend money on Amazon. Of respondents who did not own a Kindle Fire, only 19% said they would spend more money at Amazon in the next 90 days, while 29% of Kindle Fire owners said they would do so.
Even so, it seems that all is not well in the land of Kindle Fire owners. When it came to customer satisfaction the Kindle Fire came in a distant second after Apple’s iPad tablet. When asked to rate their satisfaction with their tablet, 74% of iPad owners said that they were very satisfied with their tablet, compared to only 54% of Kindle Fire owners. The good news for Amazon, though, is that although the Kindle Fire falls well below the iPad, it beats other tablets by 5%. Only 49% of owners of other tablets said they were very satisfied with their device.
Another interesting aspect of the survey deals with what, specifically, Kindle Fire owners liked and disliked most about their devices. The most popular feature of the Kindle Fire by far is its price. Fifty-nine percent of respondents listed that as what they liked best about the device. In a distant second at 31% was the color screen, followed by ease of use at 27%. Kindle Fire owners’ dislikes, on the other hand, tended to center on features that the Kindle Fire lacks but that the iPad has. The chief complaint about the Kindle Fire was the lack of physical volume buttons (27%), followed by the lack of a camera (21%), poor battery life (15%), and lack of 3G/4G connectivity (12%). Interestingly, the 3G connectivity users miss in the Kindle Fire is a feature that has been present in previous e-ink versions of the Kindle.
The full report is available from ChangeWave here.