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December Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Archived article dated Thursday December 13th 2007

Tesco's direct catalogue site direct.tesco.com retained its top spot in the table of the 100 retail websites tested this month although with a slightly lower score than last month and only just ahead of Clinton Cards.

By Glynn Davis

This represents a dramatic move up the table for the greetings card company that moved up four places this month and an impressive 52 places last month. In doing so it pushed Morrisons out of second place.

The comprehensive list of 100 sites, which includes not only the largest players but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created 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, founder of SiteMorse, says that a score of 6.5 out of 10 is decent and that all the retailers in the top 10 scored above this level, which is a good sign that the sector is taking the issue of the quality of their websites seriously.

However, he is still shocked that so many big name company’s find themselves at the bottom end of the table with the likes of WH Smith, DIY.com (the site of B&Q) and the websites of the DSG group faring especially badly. “Decent sized companies wouldn’t allow a store to be ranked this badly. Maybe their website vendors aren’t disclosing the full facts to these retailers,” suggests Shaw.

What is even more surprising is that Amazon and its sister site Endless are placed in equal ninetieth spot with a score of only 1.26 out of 10. “As online-only companies they should be doing better. These are the people who rely on being online so they really can’t afford to be doing this badly,” he says.

One of the areas they perform especially badly on is accessibility with both sites failing on 100 per cent of their pages, which makes them useless to visually impaired customers.

Although lingerie retailer La Senza is a multi-channel operator Shaw still finds it surprising that it does not provide a better website as its product mix is ideally suited to online because many male customers would prefer to buy over the internet, thereby avoiding any embarrassment in the stores. The site dropped 12 places this month to prop up the table in 97th spot with a paltry score of 0.34.

Another disappointing this month was the fact that three sites – Gap, Boots and Pets at Home - have again been excluded as a result of them either been ‘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.

Shaw says Pets at Home failed to have a website available when it came time to test the site, which he says could be down to its new provider Snow Valley not delivering the updated site on time. He recalls the company also worked with Toys R US on its site and made a great fanfare at the time of its launch through press releases even though there were still some teething problems to sort out.

Tagged as: website rankings | glynn davis

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