I’ve been in the retail business for a while and know that it’s a very very small percentage of customers who will take that extra step to rate a transaction with a store - be it online or brick and mortar. I’m going to give you one example of why you should. First a little background and some unofficial stats.

Take a Home Depot store for example (I managed one for several years). A typical week for a mid-volume store might have 12-15,000 customer transactions. Now on the bottom of every one of those receipts is a message to go online and fill out a customer survey, with a chance to win a $5,000 shopping spree. How many responses do you think we got in a week? If you think a few hundred (3-4% of all customers), you would be guessing about ten times too high. In a good week you might get 30 responses. That’s 0.2 to 0.25%. Some stores might get that up to 0.5%, but that takes some effort on all the cashiers’ part- by actually highlighting the note on the receipt and mentioning the chance to win to the customer.

Granted, a Best Buy, or Circuit City might have a higher response rate, as their customers are probably more tech savvy, but in general, the rate for brick and mortar stores is very low.

So what about online stores?

The customer is already online, and often a pop-up window might appear right after checkout asking the customer to rate the store. It takes very little extra effort on the part of the customer in this scenario. So of course the response rates are much higher, but are still usually less than 10%. Why is this? Generally it’s because we as customers are lazy. For years I was just as lazy as the next guy.

Now here’s why I say you should take the time to fill out these surveys. Consider a typical online retailer. I operate an online educational toy store called Atomic Elephant Toy so we’ll use my store as an example. We sell lots of educational toys but specialize in science kits and science toys. We have a good looking professional website. As a new company we are not the best looking out there, but we are better looking than a lot of our online competition. A newcomer who stumbles upon our site, or any other out there like it might think that we’re a decent size company who processes thousands of dollars in transactions and dozens or even hundreds of orders a day. The reality of it is that many stores like mine are surviving on far less volume than that. There may be one or two employees operating in an office/warehouse doing whatever they can to drive business.

Why should YOU fill out a survey?

For a company like the ones mentioned above, and believe me there are thousands out there like this, the owner probably looks very closely at the customer reviews their store gets on shopping sites like Shopzilla, NexTag, Pronto or Shopping.com. At least once a week I check all these sites and look for any reviews written about Atomic Elephant Toy. If it’s a negative review, even a slightly negative one, I will address it immediately. I will email the customer, and in some cases even call to ask them what I can do to make it right. Now here’s the main gist of my argument. For the positive reviews I will often email the customer to tell them thanks and even give them a code for a gift certificate on their next order. The amount depends on how much I can afford, how nice the review was, or the customer’s history with ordering from my store.

So if you’ve ever skipped an opportunity to review a store after making a transaction, think twice about it. If you’re thinking that no one will ever read the review and it won’t make much difference- well you might be right for some of the larger online stores. But you can bet the smaller stores trying to make it in a huge Internet world will read your review. Some will even answer, and reward you for your time. And another point worth noting… you can’t always tell how big a company is just by looking at their online store. They could be much smaller than you realize.