Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) place so high on most customer satisfaction surveys that the repetition has made the conclusions commonplace. Unfortunately for several financially battered retailers, their stumbling has not been helped by their satisfaction grades. The trends, both good and bad, have extended to mobile e-commerce.

Research firm Foresee issued its “ForeSee Mobile Satisfaction Index: Holiday Retail Edition.” The results are not terribly different from the Foresee e-commerce data for the same period. Retailers who do well online also do well with mobile activity. Of the 25 companies included:

Amazon tops the list at 85, with Apple (83), and QVC (83) close behind. Rounding out the top five are NewEgg (80) and Victoria’s Secret (80).

Almost no one has heard of PC hardware and parts company NewEgg. The balance of the companies are well known. Amazon had better be at the top of the list, for its own sake, since it has no physical stores to speak of. QVC does not either, because its other medium for sales is television. Apple and Victoria’s Secret must just try harder, although the popularity of their products may get mobile e-commerce buyers to have positive views of the merchandise under any circumstances.

Retailers that are in steep decline, in general, do not do well in the Foresee results. The Sears division of Sears Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: SHLD) rates just one spot from the bottom. Also-ran discounter Overstock.com Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK) also does poorly, and troubled online retailer Gilt does very badly as well.

In the range of merely mediocre are Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), each of which have huge traffic and are among the top 50 most-visited sites in the United States, according to comScore. Their volumes of business are such that mid-tier performance in the Foresee survey probably does not hurt them much. Also in the middle of the rankings are Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY) and J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP), each of which needs to do better in e-commerce and in physical store activity to keep away from trends that already have caused questions about their viability.

On the whole, the companies that did poorly in the Foresee research cannot afford to.

Methodology: In a survey of more than 6,200 consumers collected during the peak holiday shopping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the retail juggernaut scored highest among 25 of the top mobile commerce companies. The report shows that consumer satisfaction with the mobile retail experience is improving, as the Index climbs two points since last holiday season to 78 on a 100-point scale.

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