By merchantsurveys.org April 8, 2025
Today’s business landscape hinges on the views and feelings of merchants being fed back for building thriving merchant environments, driving service optimization, and fueling sustainable growth. Merchants surveys are an important way to gather this feedback, looking at merchant satisfaction, pain points and areas for improvement through experiencing real-time in the field. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that the success of merchant surveys depends on proper research and targeting.
Poorly designed or poorly implemented surveys can result in misleading data, resources that burn out, and information that we may have never got to. This essay will look at the ideal way to take away efficient merchant surveys by answering and analyzing the key elements at each stage, from goals to insights obtained from the data.
What Are the Objectives and Scope of Your Survey?
Before going ahead and crafting the merchant survey, the first and probably most important step is to establish what the research is actually about and how you want to do it. A vague purpose will nearly always lead you down a survey that is completely useless and not on point.
Identify the Purpose of the Survey
The first thing you will do is state the reason behind your survey in particular. What do you want to investigate? Measuring the satisfaction of a certain merchant with one service? Do you want to learn what the top pain points are that merchants face on your platform or within your ecosystem? You are looking for feedback on potential new features or policies. Clearly articulating the purpose will point the way to appropriate questions, framing, and survey architecture.
A company could run a merchant survey with the mission statement that more than half of merchants are abandoning your platform during a trial period. The goal would be to discover what was at the root of this churn and what can be done about it.
Establishing Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) Goals
After the general aim is set, it should be translated into clear, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. This ensures the survey stays focused, and the data collected can be directly evaluated against the specific objectives.
Rather than merely saying “Aim for an increase in merchant satisfaction”, a better SMART goal could look something like this: Increase the average merchant satisfaction ratings for customer service by 15% over the next quarter, as indicated on our quarterly merchant satisfaction survey. This gives a clear yardstick against which any further action can be judged as successful or not.
Defining the Target Audience and Scope
It is as important to know the target group clearly. Whether you are surveying all merchants or only those in size, type, or some other interaction level? Precisely define your population in such a way that you will not be collecting extraneous data and get results representative enough for the population you want.
As an example, if you want to test an exclusive marketing pitch to small business owners survey your merchants that are in the field. And so the response will be along the lines of a target audience of the tool and the conclusion thus drawn is valid.
Designing a Well-Structured and Engaging Survey
The structure of the survey itself is responsible for making or breaking it. A badly designed survey can be confusing, irritating, and in the end, provide inaccurate or incomplete information.
Selecting the Appropriate Question Types
The selection of question type is important in gathering the required information. Various types of questions are appropriate for various purposes, and the wrong selection can undermine the accuracy and applicability of the data. Popular question types include:
- Multiple Choice Questions: These are convenient for ascertaining information regarding preferences, demographics, or categorical information.
- Rating Scale Questions: These are best suited for quantifying attitudes, opinions, and satisfaction levels.
- Open-Ended Questions: These give merchants a chance to voice their ideas and emotions in their own words, giving rich, qualitative information.
- Ranking Question: These enable merchants to rank options, giving information about their relative importance.
Crafting Clear and Concise Questions
The survey needs to be in simple, short, and clear language that everyone like, its an average background technology merchant can use. Avoid the use of double-barreled questions (i.e. questions that try and ask two things at once) or ambiguous or jargonic language.
A question should touch on one thing, and that thing must be phrased in a neutral, unbiased manner. We want to coerce the merchant to a certain answer with truthful and authentic answers.
Ordering Question Logically
It can also affect the quality of the responses in which the questions are presented. Usually, it’s a good idea to begin with general, broad questions and then proceed to more detailed and specific ones. This is to guide the merchant into the survey and to create an environment for the following questions.
Think of clustering questions according to the topic for logical flow and merchants’ attention. Be sensitive to the placement of possibly disputable or sensitive questions toward the end of the survey in order not to discourage participation beforehand.
Optimizing for Mobile Devices
With today’s mobile-first environment, it’s important to make sure the survey is optimized for use on mobile phones. This entails the use of a responsive design that adjusts for various screen sizes and makes the survey simple to navigate using a touchscreen.
Texts of more than one line should be separated into smaller paragraphs, and form fields and buttons need to be big enough to be tapped with ease. Not being optimized for mobile use has a tremendous impact in lowering the response rate, particularly for merchants who do most of their business on the phone.
Keeping the Survey Concise
The length of the survey is a prime consideration for ascertaining its response rate. Merchants are busy businesspeople, and they will not waste much time providing a long and tedious survey.
Strive to make the survey as brief as possible, only asking the most critical questions necessary to accomplish the objectives listed. Before ending the survey, read over each question thoroughly and question whether or not it is necessary. If not, eliminate it.
Implementation Effective Distribution
The most well-thought-out survey will still be useless if it isn’t distributed properly. It is important to have a distribution strategy to effectively reach your audiences, creating response rates and ensuring data integrity.
Choosing the Right Distributor Channels
Distribution channels will be determined by the features of the target audience and available resources. Some of the most common channels include:
- Email: This is one of the most common and can be a good bang for the buck in terms of an endpoint for a broadcast survey
- In-App Notifications: Use them to notify the merchants directly within your platform or application
- Social Media: A good medium for broader promotion and to get the word out on your survey
- SMS Messaging: Good for getting in front of merchants who may not check their email on a routine basis.
Crafting Compelling Invitations and Reminders
Survey Invitations must be crisp and clear, relevant, and easy to understand. This must clearly spell out the rationale for why they are taking this survey, what it will get them, and how much time they should expect to take in completing it.
Also, reassure merchants that what they say will be private and be used to make the experience of using this better. Reminders are a big driver of response rates but also tread carefully — too many reminders and it looks like spam.
Offering Incentives
Incentives can certainly be a useful leaven to get participation rates higher, but one needs to be careful how they set those up. The incentive would have to be pertinent to the population recruited and commensurate in value for the time and effort of doing the survey. Know more about Paid Surveys here.
Gift cards, discounts, and a chance to win are a few of the incentives that are commonly given. But keep in mind that incentives can lead to a bias in data as well, some merchants may care more about participating than others.
Timing the Distribution Strategically
Response rates can also be affected by when the survey was disseminated. Do not send out surveys in peak business hours or on/holidays (merchants are busy).
Try sending it during a time when merchants may be more willing to give you their feedback, for example, after a recent transaction or support interaction with your customer support team.
Analyzing and Acting Upon the Data
Just gathering data is only one part of the puzzle in your process. The value of a merchant survey comes in the data analysis and interpretation and the follow-on actions taken against identified concerns.
Cleaning and Validating the Data
When we have data to analyze, it needs to be cleaned as well in order to properly work with it and validate it. Going right here, item by the way doing to verify and delete all wrong incomplete or duplicate responses.
Either manual or automated survey tools can be used to perform data validation. It aims at performing the sanity check on data that might have been incorrect/ biased and could change the result.
Applying Appropriate Analytics Techniques
The analytical approaches to be used will depend on the data collected and the research questions. Look at common techniques:
- Descriptive Statistics: They help summarise the data, such as mean, percentage, frequency, etc.
- Inferential Statistics: These are used to make inferences about the population from sample data.
- Regressive Analysis: This is used for finding the relation between variables.
- Text Analysis: Broken down, this is used to understand themes and sentiments from open-ended answers.
Appropriate statistics use and proper interpretation of results are important.
Identifying Key Insights and Trends
The analysis aims for key observations and patterns that can drive decisions. This is the act of searching the data for trends, visibility to both high and low-hanging fruit, as well as the root cause of merchant satisfaction/dissatisfaction.
Maybe just segment the data to attempt and see if there are any differences in response by things like age, industry or level of engagement. It can offer a little more thoroughness to the merchant experience.
Communication and Results, and Taking Action
The last step is to share the findings of your survey with involved stakeholders and then act to fix whatever needs fixing The next is to craft this action plan, assign it tasks, and track progress over time.
Another necessary step to implement after the survey results is communicating them to the merchants that are participating. The fact that they care enough to still give input shows they know we listened and are listening. When transparency happens, there’s trust and other surveys follow yours.
Continuous Improvement
Merchant surveys are not a one-time thing. You need to do this regularly to measure relative performance across time and look out for new infringements. From the feedback after each survey, you should be able to iterate on both how the survey looks and what is targeted for future surveys.
These same companies that continue to listen to what merchants need and execute changes in support of meeting that feedback is how they foster merchant relationships and better the experience of their merchants, which hopefully leads to sustainable growth.
Conclusion
Ultimately, creating and disseminating valuable merchant surveys is a process that needs to be done strategically and methodically. By thoughtfully setting goals, creating surveys that are addressed appropriately, creating and executing appropriate distribution strategies to follow up with, analyzing data and taking action, companies get key insights into the merchant experience that can lead to real changes.
At its core, merchants’ surveys have to be seen as a listening process for this under-appreciated and critical stakeholder group if we are going to improve continuously. The importance of the never-ending feedback loop to sustainable and successful businesses with long lifecycles.