Measuring customer satisfaction in ecommerce business

One of the toughest questions that ecommerce businesses face concerns what is at the heart of a business –customer satisfaction. At first glance, anyone doing ecommerce business or having an interest for this subject may wonder if the idea of customer satisfaction exists at all in ecommerce.
How to measure the customer satisfaction in e commerce ?

I'm not sure the question in here exactly.

• Zappos provides me great e-commerce customer satisfaction: Free shipping, free returns, friendly phone folks, great videos, photos of products, simple check out process
• jCrew.com on the other hand charges for shipping both ways, their checkout is clunky and a pain. They do offer a survey to fill out when you are done shopping though where you can express feedback and hopefully they use it. But, that gave me an opportunity to tell them I was not satisfied with the experience.

Using services like GetSatisfaction, UserEcho, Desk.com provide ways to get feedback about your users experience - and 'measure' it.

You could also measure and setup metrics by how many people repeat buy or how often. I buy from Zappos all the time... jCrew very rarely.

Metrics like rate of returns (how much stuff is sent back to you), customer complaints and repeat custom (do customers come back and buy again) are leading indicators of satisfaction.

Low returns, low complaints and high repeat custom would suggest that you're doing well.

Simplicity wins sometimes. The well-established "NPS Score" is a create way to measure customer loyalty (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score ). All you ask is a single question:

"How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?"

Users are more likely to answer a single question than a long survey. A good idea is to offer an additional free text field where customers can enter an optional comment. The results will give you a good base line of where you stand. From there, you can branch out and do further customer research.