November Rankings of Top 50 Retail Websites
Pure play Play.com disappoints with weakest web performance
By Glynn Davis
The performance of the website of respected entertainment retailer Play.com has declined further this month to take it to the bottom of the table of the top 50 UK retail sites tested in November for The Retail Bulletin.
Its score of only 1.79 out of 10 led to its fall of seven places since last month and represents a poor performance for a pure play retailer that crucially relies entirely on its online store for sales.
The list of sites tested has been created jointly by The Retail Bulletin and specialist website testing company Sitemorse that used its automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer’s site to generate a ranked table.
Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse, says: “The overall quality of the site has dropped even further this month with things like broken links, missing images and every page failing on accessibility. It has been in decline during the second half of the year and as a pure play retailer it simply can’t afford to be at the bottom.”
He points to its ‘function’ score (that includes broken links and emails not working) that had been nine out of 10 in April but fell to zero in September and has remained at this level for the past two months.
The significant problem is way the company has chosen to store data in the cookie on the website. When the cookie is sent back to the server it causes it to crash. Shaw says: “It’s a perfect example of a problem that would be difficult for retailers to detect but it is absolutely essential that it is corrected.”
He is keen to point out that the results delivered by Sitemorse are based on it testing a number of groups – function, accessibility, code quality, performance, email, SEO and metadata, analytics and PDF’s (documents) – which he says “removes all subjectivity”.
“It’s all about how good or bad is the web infrastructure and whether it delivers a good quality, strong performing, compliant web-user experience,” he explains. What is also important is that all sites go through the same process, regardless of whether they are transactional or not.
“Arguably it is more important for transactional sites to perform better than those that are not used to sell goods as a poor experience can kill a sale and end that customer’s relationship with the retailer,” says Shaw.
Although it is not transactional the DFS site continues to hold the top spot in the table with an impressive score of 9.5 out of 10. This is an improvement on last month’s 8.78 and places it almost three full points in front of second-placed La Senza and its 6.62.
“DFS is a good quality brand that is delivering a consistent message. The confidence in its messaging provides customers with confidence in its products,” suggests Shaw.
The only two other retailers to score at least six out of 10 are Debenhams and Top Shop, which highlights to Shaw that the vast majority of companies in the list could do better. The Sitemorse view is that a decent score is 7.5 out of 10 and only DFS passes this threshold.
“All retailers can do better and it is easy for them to do better. They just have to get the basics right. The retail brands in Germany perform much better than their UK counterparts and on the criteria such as accessibility and function, UK retailers’ sites are also nowhere near as good as local government websites,” he says.
With bad scores achieved by many of the most well respected retailers in the country, Shaw says there has been an unsurprising questioning of the Sitemorse findings. To counter this he says: “Any retail executives who have concerns over the scoring can have the details of the testing that has been undertaken on their site and a copy of the full findings.”
There have, however, been some improved performances, with Dixons steadily moving up the table. Its score of 2.86 pushed it up 12 places to 36th spot. Argos also had a great month, moving up 23 places to grab tenth spot in the table with a score of 4.44. This will be pleasing to the company as online is a crucial element of this multi-channel business and it will want to be firing on all cylinders as Christmas approaches.
Thorntons might not be quite as pleased with itself as it enters this crucial period – it was in 14th place two months ago but this month falls to 38th spot. For a retailer that has a strong focus on gifts this decline must represent a concern for management at this time of the year.
To see the rankings click here
We are keen to hear your thoughts on the Top 50 table – whether you agree with the constituents or you think there are companies that should be included instead. Please get in touch at glynnd@theretailbulletin.com and we’ll see what we can do.
About Sitemorse
Sitemorse checks compliance, measures performance and tests function of your websites, by reading content, checking code and reviewing infrastructure to reduce risk caused by on-line failure. From single page monitoring to a complete site review, Sitemorse provides both management summaries and detailed technical reports (down to the line in the code).
