By Joe Skorupa

When a customer makes a purchase on your website they choose their products, login or proceed as a guest, enter their shipping and payment information, and expect their products to be delivered in just a few days. What the shopper doesn’t see is the work that goes into making that order happen. They place the order online and “poof” expect it to magically appear on their doorstep. Customers don’t see the planning, coordination, and timing it takes to make the order happen.

Data doesn’t spin, people do. Today, spinning seems to be a national obsession, so it is refreshing to announce the spin-free results of the 2017 RIS Software LeaderBoard.

The must-read annual report is unique in the industry because it spotlights retail software vendors in head-to-head competition based on customer satisfaction scores, i.e. ratings based on evaluations by retail end users of the software. This is highly valuable information for any retail company that buys software.

Publicly available customer-satisfaction ratings are found in other fields through such organizations as J.D. Power, Consumer Reports and Zagat to name a few, but the RIS Software LeaderBoard is the only one in retail software.
In the spirit of spin-free content, the report is heavier with charts than text and includes 51 sets of vendor rankings – 50 top-10 lists and one top-20 list. Most of the text in the report covers scoring methodology, criteria and/or category definitions, how filtering and sorting works, and who voted.

Because of the bullet-proof methodology used in the rankings, which is based on exclusive analysis from an independent research firm, many people view the LeaderBoard as the Oscars of retail software and every vendor named is viewed as a winner.

The reason every vendor in the LeaderBoard is a legitimate winner is that since 46 vendors received the minimum number of votes to be included in the charts, those who appear have outperformed dozens of vendors to make the cut.
Without further ado, the top 2017 retail software winners are…

Celerant
Cegid Group
Mi9 Retail
ECRS
SAP
Manthan Systems
Aptos
PCMS Datafit
MultiDev Technologies
Oracle

These 10 software vendors are the cream of the top half of the top-20 master chart, which is the only top-20 chart in the LeaderBoard.

Note that all rankings in the Leaderboard are the outcome of 629 evaluations submitted by 327 retailers. These evaluations are converted into a Customer Satisfaction score that is the signature element in the unique report. Read more.