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October/November Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Archived article dated Monday October 29th 2007

By Glynn Davis

After a brief spell at the top of the table of the 100 retail websites tested this month Tesco's direct catalogue site direct.tesco.com fell swiftly from grace to be replaced by rival supermarket Morrisons.

This was a dramatic drop for Tesco of a hefty 17 places with a score of only 5.5 out of 10 compared with 8.3 last month. It suffered from a variety of failures including broken links and missing images that impacted significantly on the customer experience on its site.

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.

One of the big surprises of the month was the move by Habitat into second place with a score of 7.85 having been previously excluded from the list because of its reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which SiteMorse believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, says its dramatic inclusion in the list highlights how Java Script-type code at the front-end of a website can hide the fact that the underlying site is very good. “It can be frustrating that a good website can be underneath but this shows why retailers need to constantly check and test their sites,” he says.

Shaw suggests that the appearance of Habitat, following that of Halfords two months ago, is a sign that retailers are now taking notice of how simple changes to their websites can make a big difference to how they operate.

The only website now excluded from the table is Gap following the replacement this month of Screwfix with Republic because of the former’s repeat offending and the decision by SiteMorse that it was less of a major retail name than its fashion chain replacement.

Another example of a retailer that has clearly made changes to its website is Argos that has previously been criticised in this column for its poor performance but this month it moved up an impressive 44 places to 27th spot with a score of 4.7 compared with 2.22 last month. “The code quality has improved significantly and this has helped its performance. And the accessibility of the site is also up too,” says Shaw.

Only 0.79 per cent of its pages now fail the accessibility test for visually impaired people compared with 66.93 per cent last month. This is an issue that all retailers should address because a failure to make their sites available to all people not only loses potential sales but could lead to legal action. In the US Target.com now faces a class action lawsuit because of its inaccessibility to blind people. More such actions are inevitable on both sides of the pond.

Among the retailers in the table failing the accessibility test are Mothercare (with 56.69 per cent of its pages failing) and Mothercare-owned Early Learning Centre (with 70.87 per cent pages failing). These contribute to their overall poor showing with the former in the 79th spot and the latter plumb last in 99th place.

What is surprising about these dire showings is that Mothercare has recently been hyping its social networking site gurgle.com. Shaw suggests that retailers are prone to put their time and money into such initiatives rather than focusing their resources on addressing the fundamental flaws in their basic websites. “Retailers are known for spending cash on fancy stuff when the fundamental building blocks need to be put right first,” he says.

Tagged as: website rankings | benchmarking

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