UK shopping sites rank higher than US

US-owned retailers websites have performed significantly worse than their British counterparts and delivered some of the weakest scores in the table of 100-plus websites tested this month for The Retail Bulletin. According to Sitemorse, a specialist in website testing, it ranked US-owned sites lower than their UK counterpars. The comprehensive list of sites, which includes not only the largest players such as eBay and John Lewis but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created by The Retail Bulletin and Sitemorse.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, says: “Everybody thinks the US leads the market in terms of technology and the internet but for website quality, compliance and performance the bottom 10 comprises predominantly US-owned retailers. This compares with the top 10 that are quintessentially British merchants.”

The biggest riser is the Littlewoods Shop Direct-owned Empire Stores that climbed an impressive 70 places to sixth spot with a score of 6.92, which compares with only 3.8 last month. What is strange is that Littlewoods’ other sites perform with such mixed results – Marshall Ward is in a credible 26th place while the Littlewoods site is in lowly 94th spot.

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.

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