Bunnings Warehouse has overtaken Home Timber & Hardware to rank as Australia’s number one hardware store for customer satisfaction, according to the latest rankings from Roy Morgan Research.
Bunnings recorded a customer satisfaction rating of 89% in September, up 0.1% points on the same time last year, Roy Morgan found, while Home Timber & Hardware slipped from the top position, declining 0.4% points over the course of the year to 88.6%.
Home Timber’s sister brand Mitre 10 (both brands are owned by Metcash) finished in third place, after seeing its customer satisfaction decline 3% in the past year to 86.9%.
In fourth place is True Value Hardware with a customer satisfaction rating of 76.3%, (down 1.7% points).
While Bunnings holds a dominant position in the Australian market, it is facing challenges abroad after last year’s acquisition of the Homebase network in the UK and Ireland.
With 244 Homebase stores and eight Bunnings pilot stores in the UK and Ireland as at September 30, Bunnings says a total of 15 to 20 pilot stores are expected to be either trading or nearing completion by December 31.
In a statement, Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine observed that Bunnings is “undoubtedly Australia’s best-known hardware store”, however, when it comes to customer satisfaction, it “doesn’t have it all its own way with rival Home Timber & Hardware just behind”.
According to the Roy Morgan, approximately 13.1 million Australians visited a hardware store during the last three months.
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Martin Kovacs is a journalist with experience covering the IT, consumer electronics, retail, finance and energy sectors.
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