Online retailers do not make Christmas shopping easy

Archived article dated Friday December 1st 2006

Few retailers provide information on the latest date to place orders for pre-Christmas delivery and many do not properly assist those customers who are seeking advice on a Christmas gift recommendation, according to research by Customer Experience Benchmarking firm, Global Reviews.

The most worrying weakness the research highlights is that, with exactly 26 days before Christmas, no leading online retailer displayed the latest date to place orders for pre-Christmas delivery on their homepage. This simple information is essential for companies that want to manage the expectations of their customers. But only four of the 15 benchmarked leading online companies (Amazon, Argos, Blackwell and Tesco Direct) had a link to this crucial information on their homepage, with most ignoring the area altogether.

Another industry weak point was around gift recommendation. These are systems that make it easy for a customer to find gifts that fit within their requirements (for example, by gift recipient or monetary value) and often help companies improve customer conversion rates. While 14 of the 15 websites provided some form of gift recommendation, only 3 of the 15 scored over 50%, which shows that only a handful had the ability to properly advise shoppers on gift selection. Amazon had the leading gift finder with a score of 72% followed by Argos (58%), John Lewis (54%) and CD Wow (46%). But the average score for this category was only 30%, which was significantly lower than the 71% average across the other categories of the benchmark.

Adam Goodvach, a Director of Global Reviews, said: “There's a clear opportunity for companies to improve conversion rates by improving the customer experience. As a pre-Christmas review, we expected companies to have invested more in gift recommendation, especially large retailers selling more products. A gift recommendation system enables websites to push products to people who are more likely to buy them and remove the need for customers to trawl through a website in search of an appropriate gift. This can help establish customer loyalty while a bad experience with gift delivery dates can do considerable damage to a company's brand.”

Global Reviews undertook its study of 15 well-known online retailers. Amazon's UK website lead Tesco (non-groceries), John Lewis and HMV in November, using a benchmark of over 100 criteria to assess each website. The initial Retail Benchmark assessed key aspects of the shopping process from product selection and the shopping cart, through to the entering of credit card details.

Overall, the benchmark found that the industry does provide a good online experience for Christmas shoppers. Companies reliably provided information about their products and the shopping carts were simple yet functional. The checkout processes were quite clear and systems catered for people who make mistakes along the way.

Tagged as: online shopping | internet retailing

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