Top e-tailers maintain position
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sees Tesco in the number one spot, followed by fashion retailers Next it number 5, Fenwick at number 6 and BHS at 7. John Lewis came at a surprising number 20 and seductive lingerie label Ann Summers at 98. Notably absent from the list is Gap.com.
Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, says: “I suspect it is a sign that there have not been many changes made to these sites over the past month but even if they have made updates to them then it shows that somebody is at least testing them before the changes happen. It is good news that there is some consistency coming in, which is what you would expect over time.”
Below the top five some major moves have been made up the table by pure play retailers with Figleaves climbing 31 places to 25th place with a score of 5.06 out of 10 compared with 3.16 last month. This might have been a result of the appointment of a new senior management team at Figleaves, who are looking to overhaul the entire business.
“One thing we notice is the lack of accountability of people who do things online so if they know somebody is looking at the online operation then things could improve. With a new boss in place people will take more care until they know what exactly they can get away with,” suggests Shaw.
However, one of the major disappointments with the online-only operators is there shockingly poor scores on accessibility for visually impaired shoppers. Figleaves, Net-a-porter, Asos, Amazon, Endless, ebuyer and Play.com all failed the accessibility test on every one of their pages. Firebox was the best of the bunch with a lesser 25 per cent of its pages failing.
For yet another month it has not been possible to score and rank the sites of Gap and Boots as they continue to be excluded from the table as a result of them either being ‘down’ at the time of testing or because of their reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which SiteMorse believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites.