No major surprises there, then. The thought of wading through piles of jumbled stock and tackling the indifference of staff is enough to make all but the most hardened of shoppers break out in a sweat before even passing the store threshold.
And the Which? survey of 10,000 shoppers doesn’t let the third member of the sportswear trio off lightly either, with a red-faced Sports Direct in the bottom 10, tied with Arcadia’s Topshop.
Tales of poor customer satisfaction from a multitude of retailers in all sectors should make chief executives blanche. But fashion chiefs should be biting their nails more so than others. Clothing is going the same way as CDs and DVDs and finding its feet in the online sector, which is undoubtedly outperforming the rest of the retail market and rules out the need for staff at all.
Asos outshone its bricks-and-mortar counterparts this Christmas with a dazzling 86 per cent sales rise in the seven weeks to January 20. Pre-tax profits are expected to reach nearly£7 million – 20 per cent above forecasts. The fashion e-tailer now has 1.7 million registered customers, up 600,000 on last January.
In Asos chief executive Nick Robertson’s words yesterday: “The high street is not a very positive place to be and it’s going to be very tough for non-internet-only retailers.”
Dolcis is a case in point, after it fell into administration this week; the first fashion retailer to hit the buffers this year, but probably not the last.
And the figures tell the story. When the high street was languishing with a meagre sales growth of 0.3 per cent in December, the online sector was seeing out the year by totting up a£46.6 billion spend in 2007.
But fashion e-tailers cannot rest easy. Other relative newcomers to the online space are snapping at their virtual heels.
John Lewis – the second best performing retailer in the Which? poll after sister brand Waitrose – is ramping up its fashion offer online and successfully emulating its much-lauded customer service in the web sphere.
And retailers are also cottoning on to the benefits of the social networking phenomena. 5 per cent of Topshop’s web traffic is driven by its MySpace page and Primark has 95,000 members on its Primark Appreciation Society page on Facebook.
When leaving a store becomes the most pleasant part of a shopping trip, fashion retailers need to step up to the fore and offer the customer stress-free shopping alternatives.
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