News

Press release

23 November 2005 - UK turns to eBay for Christmas shopping bargains

But E-retailers Need to Oil Shopping Trolleys Ahead of
Christmas Rush, SciVisum Christmas eCommerce Study Finds

But UK e-tailers need to get their act in gear: 95 per cent said they would abandon websites if performance was not up to scratch, with 55 per cent saying they would not give the website a second chance, but instead would turn to online competitors. The number one reason for abandoning a website was sluggish performance, cited by 78 per cent. Three quarters (76 per cent) said they would not wait more than a minute for pages to respond before abandoning a site. The biggest annoyance for customers was complicated website registration processes, which 74 per cent found a turn off.

These are the key findings of the SciVisum Christmas eCommerce Study 2005, undertaken over a four-week period in October by web testing specialist SciVisum.

In the run up to Christmas, UK web sites need to prepare to handle this predicted surge in demand from consumers, the study concluded. Despite warnings, SciVisum found last year that the majority of e-retail sites failed to prepare their infrastructure for Christmas. If they fail to do the same again, they risk losing millions of pounds in lost sales as a result of consumer frustrations.

“Bargain hunters will be flocking to the web in droves this Christmas,” said Deri Jones, CEO, SciVisum. “But our study shows that UK consumers are not willing to tolerate poor performance, or give sites a second chance. E-retailers can expect a season of bad will from consumers if they don’t take action now to prepare their websites for the Christmas rush in the coming month.”

He goes on to say: “In fact the number of internet shoppers is expected to shoot up by 12 percent during the Christmas period alone with the biggest number of users logging on to buy presents in the first week of December. During that week 1 in every 7 internet visits will be to e-tailers.* The way to ensure you have a good online shopping experience is to always look out for the ISIS logo (www.imrg.org/ISIS) which shows that the shop is registered with the official industry backed and Government endorsed merchant accreditation scheme.”

Bargain hunters

The majority (89 per cent) of consumers said that they are preparing to go online in search for Christmas shopping bargains, with 44 per cent planning to scoop bargains on eBay and 70 per cent on Amazon. A quarter said they would be shopping on CD Wow, 18 per cent on Play.com, 11 per cent on Dabs.com and 12 per cent on ebuyer.

Only 11 per cent said they would turn to the High Street instead. However not all high street shops will lose out: respondents also said that they would be looking to online versions of high street stores. A quarter of respondents said they would look for online bargains with Argos online, and 17 per cent at Tesco online.

Customer frustration

However, consumers are regularly frustrated by their online shopping experiences, with only 4 per cent saying they generally had good experience. The top three complaints were complicated website registration forms (74 per cent); general website crashes (66 per cent); and online shopping baskets crashing (62 per cent). Half the respondents also complained that websites often seemed to freeze at odd moments in the journey (49 per cent); of an inability to phone if necessary (52 per cent) and the inability to amend their order (51 per cent).

However, 89 per cent of people said that when they abandoned a transaction at the shopping basket, no-one at the company had ever got in touch with them about it. Only 3 per cent had ever been contacted by the company trying to find out what went wrong. Only 8 per cent had been contacted by the company with another offer to entice them back to the site.

Jones comments, “I was shocked by the frequency of shopping basket complaints. 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 unfortunately it is likely that many online managers are completely unaware of the problems.”

“E-tailers are missing a trick by not getting back in touch with customers who abandon the shopping basket. Our research shows that for many customers, this will be the end of the relationship - they just won’t return again.”

Online loyalty

A good online shopping experience is now paramount for customers in choosing who to shop with and go back to. 88 per cent said that a good online shopping experience, in particular a good ‘user journey’ with error free, consistent and fast page delivery, and clear navigation, encouraged them to go back again. Whereas 44 cent said that a bad experience had caused them never to shop at the same website again. Nearly half (49 per cent) said that they would only go back to websites where the experience had been good.

Fast performance

Fast website performance is now expected as a given. Over three quarters (78 per cent) said they would abandon a sluggish website. Over half (55 per cent) said that if a site was sluggish, they would instead try an online competitor’s store. A third (35 per cent) said that they would not wait more than thirty seconds for a website page to appear, with 7% only waiting ten seconds. Only 24 per cent said they would be willing to wait more than two minutes, with only 4 per cent willing to wait more than 5 minutes.

Demands increasing

Good performance was even more expected from heavy web users. All of them said they would never again shop at a site who had given a bad online experience, versus only 11 per cent of occasional shoppers. 86 per cent of heavy users said a good online experience was a crucial factor if they were to be an ongoing customer. All of them said they would only return if they had a good experience, versus 32 per cent of those who shopped monthly. Heavy users all said that they would immediately surf onto an online competitor’s site if a site was performing badly, whereas 44 per cent of occasional users said they would be willing to go back and try the site again later. Occasional users were more likely to also look to the high street as an alternative, with 24 per cent saying they would instead try the high street branch of the same store, versus only 11 per cent overall.

Methodology

SciVisum surveyed a cross-section of 250 consumers at mainland stations in the UK over a four-week period in October. The respondents comprised 7% who shopped online daily; 24% who shopped online weekly; 32% who shopped online monthly; 29% who shopped online occasionally such as Christmas and Mother’s Day; and 8% who did not shop online. All respondents were asked about their plans for Christmas shopping. Only those who shopped online were asked about their online shopping experiences.

Recommendations

Based on the findings, SciVisum made a number of broad recommendations for e-tailers to improve their performance:

1. Simple uptime/downtime monitoring of your home page and/or a few main pages simply won't reveal how the shopping transactions are behaving - 24/7 functional monitoring, running multi-page User Journeys that mimic real users' product finding and purchasing transactions on-line is what is required. Ensure that these KPI metrics are measured throughout. For the eCommerce engineers:
2. Review key transactions such as the 'add to cart' function of your website - to ensure that the server and database load is kept to a minimum. Firstly watch out for HTTP 'POST' data bloat, so that only essential variables are passed within it, such as the product part number; and secondly avoid adding or changing cookies and sessionIDs during the crucial later stages of the purchase process.
3. Analyse web systems for 'database locking' type flaws, (e.g. is there is a limit on how many users can concurrently add a database line representing their purchases) which can confusingly produce errors at load levels well below the capacity of the server hardware, which makes it hard for the IT team to identify the problem.
4. Be aware that although 'add to cart' functions may perform well in 'once off' or 'normal use' testing, only simulated-user load/stress testing of the functionality will expose underlying problems that cause more sporadic failures; even 1% failure during busy periods is 10 times higher than 99.9% Service Level Agreement requires.
5. Whether managed in-house or out-sourced, your web site is likely evolving and changing all the time, to respond to marketing demands, and to add to capacity and performance. These changes often cause inadvertent decline in user experience and transactional effectiveness.

Thus the IT and marketing team managers should agree an ongoing program of testing and monitoring, to allow evidence-based decision making on future upgrades; the test regime should include 24/7 functional monitoring, regular stress tests, perhaps twice-yearly, and ad hoc trouble-shooting audits say yearly to ensure the overall design and infrastructure is not losing its edge.

“Buying a product from a web site engages the user in the highest number of user steps and this is where web site owners are most likely to be blind to functionality problems in the user journey and also where they are most likely to loose potential revenue impacting profitability. Web site owners need to deploy complex monitoring throughout the purchasing journey to access the full scale of the problem,” concluded Jones.

The SciVisum Christmas Ecommerce Performance Study 2005 management report can be requested here:: http://www.scivisum.co.uk/report/xmas2005

- ends -

Notes to Editor

* Figures taken from IMRG website www.imrg.org