Poor retail websites failing customers

Many of the UK 's largest retailers are giving customers a very poor online experience as the majority of their websites fail on key performance criteria, according to specialist website testing company SiteMorse. For The Retail Bulletin SiteMorse tested the first 125 pages of the websites of the UK 's 15 largest general retailers and found that only Next managed to perform at a suitably high standard. Its 7.78 out of 10 score came above the threshold that SiteMorse regards as acceptable for a major corporation.

Although Matalan did not quite make it above this threshold SiteMorse says it performed "pretty well" with a score of 5.06 - well clear of Comet in third place with 3.60. From the 15 sites both Halfords and Burberry had to be excluded before they could be tested because they "break the rules of accessibility". Of the remainder the fully-transactional Next site was the only one to have zero errors. It also had a relatively low number of warnings.

Among all the FTSE 100 companies Marks & Spencer has the second worst performing website, based on SiteMorse testing, scoring well below the 4.34 average across all the constituents of the index. The one area that it did score well on was the accessibility of its site to visually impaired people as only 6.3 per cent of its pages failed.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, suggests that many major companies simply "throw money at hardware" to improve the performance of their websites, which he believes is a mistake because it does not overcome the fundamental problems that generally affect sites' performance. "You can have a Ferrari but if the M25 is blocked then it makes no difference," he says. (The Retail Bulletin)