October 18 2007

High Street Retailers: websites worse this year than last

Webcredible's annual benchmark report on the customer experience on the UK's leading high street retailers' websites shows that - while overall the performance is a smidgin better,  half of the companies  have regressed.  Taking an estimate of the impact on revenues due to checkout abandonment, Webcredible claim an impact of £100m (ie 1% of the IMRG's £10bn Christmas estimate).

Whatever the actual impact it's always good to see consistently-repeated benchmarking exercises.

Webcredible's approach is to consider the following 20 factors and assign a score of up to 5 for each (giving the mandatory 'score out of 100'). The factors are:

1. Search function is in the same place on every page and is highly visible
2. A link to both the basket and checkout is clearly visible on every page
3. Price is always clearly displayed next to any product
4. Users are given help in choosing products
5. Visited links to products change colour
6. Number of results and search term are clearly displayed at the top
7. Option to change number of products displayed is provided
8. Sort and filter options are available
9. Product categories are provided and clearly visible on the homepage
10. Orientation cues are provided and clearly visible on the homepage
11. Navigation within a category is possible
12. Highly visible ‘Add to basket’ button provided
13. Product description & Enlargeable image provided
14. Similar & Complementary product available
15. Highly visible ‘Proceed to checkout’ button at the top and bottom
16. The same form is used for both logging in and registering
17. Highly visible progress bar provided during checkout
18. Delivery costs are highlighted at the beginning of the process
19. Users are provided with sufficient help when an error is made
20. Summary page is used and clearly shows the purchase hasn’t been made.

The good news is that the lowest score (25) has now increased to 47.

HMV has done well - by maintaining its score it's rised to the top of the pile simply by others falling from grace (venerable M&S has dropped from 1st to 12th). Game has raised its game (sorry) to rise from 18th to 2nd.

The top table, for your perusal, is reproduced here.

Rankings for The Online High Street 2007

 

2007 rank		2006 rank	Website	2007 score	2006 score
1	é	5	HMV (www.hmv.co.uk)	70	70
2	é	18	Game (www.game.co.uk)	66	35
3		3	Mothercare (www.mothercare.com)	64	73
4	é	6	Argos (www.argos.co.uk)	62	69
5	ê	4	John Lewis (www.johnlewis.com)	62	71
6	é	11	Body Shop (www.thebodyshop.co.uk)	62	54
7	é	8	Currys (www.currys.co.uk)	61	66
8	ê	2	Early Learning Centre (www.elc.co.uk)	59	74
9	é	10	Waterstones (www.waterstones.co.uk)	59	62
10	é	15	Debenhams (www.debenhams.com)	57	50
11	ê	9	H Samuel (www.hsamuel.co.uk)	57	64
12	ê	1	Marks & Spencer (www.mands.com)	55	81
13		-*	B&Q (www.diy.com)	54	-*
14	ê	13	Accessorize (www.accessorize.co.uk)	54	52
15	ê	12	Hamleys (www.hamleys.com)	54	54
16	ê	7	Boots (www.boots.co.uk)	51	67
17	ê	16	WH Smith (www.whsmith.co.uk)	50	44
18	ê	17	Next (www.next.co.uk)	49	43
19	ê	14	Woolworths  (www.woolworths.co.uk)	48	50
20	ê	19	Top Shop (www.topshop.co.uk)	47	31
				57.0	56.8

* B&Q did not feature in last year’s research and so do not have a previous score for 2006

The full survey is available from Webcredible.

by Ian Jindal