You are here: News / March Website Rankings of Retailers
March Website Rankings of Retailers
Archived article dated Friday March 20th 2009
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.
By Glynn Davis
In the table for March all the US-owned sites were placed in the lower half of the table and four were to be found languishing among the bottom 10 sites. The four culprits comprised eBay, Amazon, Endless.com and Dell with the latter two positioned right at the foot of the table. All four failed to score more than a paltry two out of 10.
The comprehensive list of 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: “Everybody thinks the
Indicative of the poor US-owned sites is Toys R US, which is placed at number 78 in the table with a score of 3.93. According to Shaw it has the most functional failings of all the sites tested, which means problems with links not working. Even the links to its sister sites in the
Toys R Us also claims that its site meets the ‘priority 1’ accessibility guidelines, which makes it usable by visually impaired people. However, Shaw says this is not the case and there are many pictures on the site that do not have text descriptions, which are required by the guidelines.
“The question is, ‘who has told them that their site passes such a test?’ Somebody must have misled them on this issue,” he suggests.
Another poor performer this month is Figleaves that is the biggest faller having dropped 54 places to 97th spot with a score of 2.18, which compares with 5.46 in February. “It fails on everything: all accessibility tests and basic code quality. One of its main failings is the ‘press section’ archive where none of the links work,” explains Shaw.
On a more positive note 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.
After criticising the websites of DSG over the past few months it is worth giving them some praise this time as most of its sites have moved up the table on the back of widespread improvements. Dixons has moved up 19 places, PC World up six and Pixmania up five. The only weak performer was its Currys site that dropped two places.
To see the rankings click here.
In order to continue to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the relative performances of the
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).
Tagged as: sitemorse | website rankings
Share this article:
Should your colleagues be reading the Retail Bulletin?
Let them know about us.
