In April this year SciVisum tested the on-line purchasing process, and specifically the 'add to cart/basket' function, of 50 of the UK's top retail sites.
The Ecommerce Performance Study 2004, released last week, found that the majority of shopping carts provide consumers with an unpredictable and unsatisfactory experience, making web shopping a lottery.
On average, said the usability study, customers were prevented from making purchases on UK web sites for 9 hours and 30 minutes a month. One in five carts did not function for 12 or more hours a month and over three quarters failed to meet the standard service level of availability of 99.9%, equating to a maximum 43 minutes of accumulated failures a month.
A leading DIY chain had shopping carts that failed to work for more than four days during the study, making it the worst performer.
"UK e-commerce sites are slapping customers in the face, rather than shaking them by the hand. Turning consumers away once they have made the decision to buy is commercial suicide. Although specific steps of a transaction may fail to complete, in most cases the web site itself is still functioning, so it is likely that many on-line managers are completely unaware of the problems," said Deri Jones, SciVisum's CEO.
"Web site operators need to stress test the crucial functionality on their web sites, down to the transactional level to assess the full scale of the problem. On average the 'add to cart/basket' step failed to function correctly in more than one in 100 cases. This is just the tip of the iceberg," warned Jones, "since consumers typically buy 2/3 items at a time and perform multiple steps to complete a purchase, the true number of consumers let down will be more than one in 20."
Only 20% of shopping carts were able to handle daily and weekly traffic patterns consistently, and the best performers included John Lewis, Waitrose Direct Wines, Orange, Figleaves and WHSmith.
"In e-commerce every transaction counts. It's the sporadic and unpredictable performance of web sites that is the most worrying to users. Our study shows that web sites are not coping with the heavier loads that occur day by day, failing through inconsistency to support consumer-buying habits and completely missing the boat when it comes to giving e-consumers a satisfactory, reliable experience. On-line retailers need to test and monitor crucial site functionality or they will lose customers to more nimble rivals," added Jones.
SciVisum tested two aspects of the shopping cart function – the web page coding and the response time – and found that contrary to expectations, faulty coding rather than slow downloading was the major cause of shopping cart failure.
According to James Roper, the CEO of industry association the Interactive Media in Retail Group:
"20 million UK shoppers are expected to spend £17 billion on-line this year. Many UK e-retailers have made significant strides in improving consumer experience, and we are not surprised that most of the best are IMRG Members. But the appalling state of other retailers' web services is both shocking and completely unacceptable; it blights our industry, and we are grateful to SciVisum for revealing it. Their study shows that bad web site performance will cost merchants at least £225 million in 2004 if they don't get their act together."
A free copy of the study can be requested from SciVisum