An Online Mystery Shopping Study conducted by www.wine-searcher.com over a period of one month has found that retailers must improve their online practices if they want to gain and keep customers.

Wine-Searcher partnered with Wine Intelligence, a Wine Market Research company and mystery shopped twice on 50 online wine retailers' sites in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

The study, which assessed and benchmarked a broad sample of online retailers and tracked retailer performance against online best practices, covered the wine Web site’s design, e-commerce capability and retailer responsiveness to the mystery shoppers' requests for products and services.

According to the study, 49 percent of the retailer's Web sites were satisfactory in design and ease of use rather than excellent in terms of online best practices. Almost all Web sites did offer their customers full e-commerce functionality to make online purchases but in terms of responsiveness to email queries, retailers did not choose to use an initial acknowledgement mail and 34 percent chose not to respond to the mystery shopper's email at all.

Also, regarding the location of email contact details on the Web sites, the mystery shoppers found that on some sites, there was more than one email ID given which could prove potentially confusing for the shopper. However, 67 percent of the Web sites made it easy to locate the email contact details with email IDs correct and current.

Another important factor, the need for specific responses uncovered the quality of the reply in terms of presentation and format varied from retailer to retailer but that the content of the responses was satisfactory despite the variances in style.

From the study's findings, it concludes that 17 percent of the sample group offers an exceptional retail experience and another 28 percent that fall short of providing customer satisfaction.