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Holiday bargain hunters are least tolerant online shoppers

SciVisum Study Reveals A Quarter Would Give Bad Websites Just One Chance To Get It Right

These are the key findings of the Online Travel Study undertaken across the UK by web testing specialist SciVisum. The study confirmed the huge commercial value of holiday shoppers to online companies and the risk of financial loss if they fail to guarantee smooth transactions on their sites.

Big spenders?

Consumers who buy holidays online shop more frequently and spend more than average online shoppers. On average those who buy holidays spend around £118 a month compared to an average monthly spend of £88 by all other online shoppers. Over a third shop monthly, (36 per cent) and a quarter do so once a week. They also spend more on a single purchase, with a huge 96 per cent investing £100 or more on a single item.

Women are far more likely to buy their holidays online than men (63 per cent compared with 57 per cent), and across the UK, central London has the largest percentage of consumers booking a break via the internet. Those living in the south, London and Scotland are also more likely to turn their backs on high street travel agents than their counterparts in the North and Midlands.

Why are they shopping online?

For those holiday shoppers choosing to book their break via the internet, speed and price are the main motivators for going online. 66 per cent gave both as their main reasons for doing so whilst only 57 percent of other shoppers claim to be driven by the same factors. Other influences cited by online consumers include a wider range of choice and the avoidance of high street queues.

Low tolerance?

Whilst consumers who buy holidays online regularly spend more, e-tailers be warned, they are also the shoppers most prone to web rage. While over a quarter (27 per cent) would forgive a favourite website twice for poor performance, 86 per cent would leave a website with an incomplete transaction, compared with 78 per cent of all other online shoppers.

For well over half of online shoppers (64 per cent), the biggest indicator of poor performance was an online shopping basket crashing, followed closely by being unable to amend an order (60 per cent), 41 per cent would go elsewhere if the website was generally sluggish. Only 15 per cent of all online shoppers said they would persevere and stick with a badly performing site.

Recommendations

Based on the findings, SciVisum made a number of broad recommendations for eTailers 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.

Methodology

SciVisum surveyed 1000 people between the ages of 18 and 60 at mainland stations across the UK in April 2006. Questions examined buying and spending habits; frequency of online shopping; attitudes to online shopping; and attitudes to online delivery and customer service.
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About SciVisum
SciVisum is a UK based web site testing specialist, helping clients to reduce lost sales online by identifying where and when user experience suffers.

The services provide vital data not available by web-analytics or other web monitoring:
* when invisible errors impact users but are invisible to the in-house teams
* when wrong or missing page content forces users to abandon their purchase journeys
* what % of marketing campaign traffic is lost due to under-capacity in one or more vital steps such as 'add to basket' or 'checkout' pages.

The company's services measure the performance and functionality of client's business-critical on-line systems. Using the multi-page User Journeys approach to measurement, SciVisum's metrics provide real time KPIs and act as a common language between the business and marketing teams who work daily with journey concepts of Add-to-Basket, Checkout, Register, pay-online, login and etc; and the web technical teams who need precise input as to which step of which journey is under-performing, when and how, in order for them to most effectively apply technical resources to close the problem gaps.

Through SciVisum's testing and recommendations, clients are able to substantially increase visitor rates and customer satisfaction levels by achieving gains in key journey delivery times, increasing ability to handle peak load levels, and reducing sporadic but user-numbing error rates of 1 to 5% that most sites un-wittingly force on their users.

Clients come from a wide range of sectors and include Tesco, Eversheds, Boden, T-Mobile, Reed.co.uk, Premium Bonds, ShoesDirect, Shell, British Library, Hertfordshire Council, Health Protection Agency, Scottish & Southern Energy, The Stationery Office, National Savings and Investment Bank and uSwitch.

Test deliverables include: Load testing /Stress testing: SV-Load; 24/7 functional monitoring of complex multi-page User Journeys: SV-Monitor; Accessibility testing to the WAI guidelines: SV-Access; Functionality & troubleshooting audits and consultancy: SV-Function.