November Website Rankings of Retailers
Things can only get better for DSG International, judging by the poor performance of all its businesses in the table of retail websites tested this month for The Retail Bulletin.
By Glynn Davis
Its Dixons, Currys, PC World and Pixmania sites all scored a paltry one or less out of 10, which represents dire consistency across its various businesses. It is all the more disappointing as Pixmania has only been added to the list of sites to test this month and it achieved a score in-line with its sister sites.
Dixons is placed in 100th spot out of the 110 sites tested while Pixmania is in 104th place, PC World is at 106 and Currys is propping up the table in 108th place.
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: “The good news for DSG is that things can only get better! But it’s not a great platform from which to enter the crucial Christmas trading period. The market is tough and the competition in electricals is huge so this is not great preparation”
What makes its poor rankings especially surprising is that of all the retail categories it is electricals that have to be performing well online as it is now very easy for shoppers to compare prices across sites and to switch their allegiance. Shaw says everything about a website has to be performing to a high standard otherwise business will be lost.
Among the best performers are the clothing retailers who have taken up most of the top 10 spots in the table. “You would not expect them to have the best sites because they do not all sell online so their websites are not as important as some of the online-only and multi-channel merchants. Maybe the reason that clothing sales online are growing so fast is because the retailers are doing the best with their online stores”, suggests Shaw.
Among these high achievers is new entry Matches, which scored an impressive performance of 6.6 out of 10 on its first appearance in the list. Shaw says this performance answers some of the critics who have complained that it is too difficult to hit high scores with Sitemorse’s testing criteria.
Topping the table this month is DFS that also did well in October with a score of 8.72 but its 9.13 out of 10 this time is a record performance and marks the website out as a true leader of the pack.
Another retailer that should be highlighted is Goldsmiths, which moved up to 25th place. This is outstanding since it was placed at the bottom of the table only two months ago with a meagre 0.32 out of 10.
In contrast, Tesco Direct slipped one place to 16th spot, which marks the continuation of a disappointing trend for the company because every month between November 2007 and August 2008 it had featured in the top five. www.sitemorse.com/sa/57011 “This is possibly indicative of how you have got to keep on top of your website’s performance. You have to be on them 24 hours a day”, suggests Shaw.
Yet again it has not been possible to score and rank the site of Gap because it continues to be excluded from the table as a result of its reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which Sitemorse believes breaks the general’rules of accessibility’ of internet sites.
Toys R Us was also excluded because the site was not available when Sitemore was undertaking its testing on November 5/6. This is disappointing as it was placed in sixth spot last month.
Sitemorse will be presenting a live site testing excercise at our conference Maintaining market share through recession proof retail strategies. Online retailing is a strong theme running throught our two day conference Feb 3rd 4th Feb 09 in London. 29 leading retailers are speaking across the event. There are a limited number of complimentary delegate passes for retailers only. If you would like one please email Jane Hooper janeh@theretailbulletin.com. You can see the conference agenda here
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).
