"That's a big challenge for eBay going forward," he says.
For all goods and services, both online and offline, customer satisfaction rose to an all-time high of 74.9 in the latest of ACSI's surveys, which began in 1994. Consumer spending should continue to increase as a result, researchers say.
"Consumers are happy," Fornell says. "When they're happy they tend to spend more regardless of whether they have the income to support that spending. I'm not sure that's good for the long term, but that's what is happening."
There was one piece of bad news in e-commerce: the satisfaction score for online travel fell to 76 from 77 the previous year.
"They're lower than others in e-commerce and yet this is an area where the technology seems to be pretty well fitting," Fornell says. "It should be very lucrative. They still haven't found the right mix of things here. ... We've been measuring them for five or six years. They're actually lower now than when we first started measuring them and that is a little disturbing."