IT STILL BEATS STANDING IN LINE

Good prices, free shipping, shopping in your PJs... whatever. What have those e-tailers done for us lately? Consumers lost some of the love they'd had for online retailers in the last holiday season, according to the widely watched American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan. It was the first time in the age of the Internet that scores fell.

Amazon.com, which had been one of the highest-scoring companies, found its satisfaction rating falling 5 percent, to a score of 84, and getting bested by its bookselling competitor Barnes & Noble; eBay's ratings also fell 5 percent, to 80. Those numbers are on a scale where 100 means perfection and 0 would mean something along the lines of an old Rolling Stones song. "Increased traffic to these sites has made it more difficult to service customers well," says Larry Freed, an independent analyst quoted by the Michigan survey.

But both companies were underwhelmed with the survey's results, which revealed that e-tailers still have higher scores than traditional department and discount stores. "We do everything we can to ensure that everybody who shops on our site has a great experience," says Patty Smith of Amazon. An eBay spokesman says it has heard rumblings of customer dissatisfaction and has made some moves--like distributing a customer-service phone number to more users.

Maybe it's all just a sign that e-tailing is growing up. What kind of successful business really can make everybody happy?

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