SciVisum eCommerce Performance Report 2004
2 June 2004 - E-consumers stranded at checkout empty handed
- majority of UK Web sites have faulty shopping carts
…Web shopping a lottery, uncovers SciVisum Study
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outlining the performance shopping carts amongst leading UK retailers,
produced from the results of 24/7 monitoring of 51 sites.
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2 June 2004 - E-consumers stranded at checkout empty handed - majority
of UK Web sites have faulty shopping carts
…Web shopping a lottery, uncovers SciVisum Study
2 June, 2004 - The majority of UK web sites are guilty of leaving e-consumers
stranded at the checkout empty handed, once they have already spent valuable
time browsing and selecting goods to purchase. This is due to erratic
functionality within shopping carts, at a critical step in the online
purchasing process.
The majority of shopping carts provide consumers with an unpredictable
and unsatisfactory experience, making Web shopping a lottery. E-consumers
are prevented from making purchases on UK web sites for 9 hours and 30
minutes a month on average, (115 hours a year). 80 per cent of web sites
perform inconsistently with widely varying response times, timeouts and
errors - leaving consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst
unable to complete their purchase successfully. This is potentially costing
e-retailers millions in lost sales from consumer frustrations.
These were the key findings of the Ecommerce Performance Study 2004,
by web testing specialist SciVisum, which carried out 24/7 monitoring
of the online buying process on UK retail web sites over a period of one
month.
On average UK shopping carts in the study were out of action for more
than ten times the accepted industry standard. 1 in 5 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 per cent 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.
"20 million UK shoppers are expected to spend £17 billion
online 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 website performance will cost merchants at least £225
million in 2004 if they don't get their act together," commented
James Roper, CEO, IMRG (Interactive Media In Retail group).
The SciVisum Ecommerce Performance Study 2004 tested the online buying
process, specifically the ‘add to cart/basket’ function, of
the web sites of over 50 of the UK’s leading e-retailers for a period
of four weeks during April 2004. It also identified daily and weekly trends
in online shopping and industry wide peak shopping times for e-consumers.
“UK ecommerce 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 online managers are completely
unaware of the problems,” said Deri Jones, CEO, SciVisum.
“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 1 in 100 cases. This is
just the tip of the iceberg, 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 1 in 20.”
Best and worst performers
UK web sites displaying the worst errors included a leading high street
mobile phone store, a well-known music/DVD retailer and a leading DIY
chain, which accumulated more than four days a month without shopping
carts functioning.
Only 20 per cent of shopping carts were able to handle daily and weekly
traffic patterns consistently, and the best performers included John Lewis
(www.johnlewis.com), Waitrose Direct Wines (www.waitrosedirect.co.uk),
Orange (shop.orange.co.uk), Figleaves (www.figleaves.com) and WHSmith
(www.whsmith.co.uk).
“In ecommerce 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 giving
e-consumers a satisfactory, reliable experience. Online retailers need
to test and monitor crucial site functionality or they will lose customers
to more nimble rivals,” added Jones.
The 51 leading UK ecommerce web sites tested included retailers of music,
books and videos (18 per cent), clothing and fashion (23 per cent), catalogue
department stores (22 per cent), consumables and electrical equipment
(14 per cent). The remaining 23 per cent of web sites tested consisted
of web sites selling DIY products, mobile phones, cameras and gifts.
Methodology
The SciVisum Ecommerce Performance Study 2004 tested the ‘add to
cart/basket’ function of over 50 of the UK’s leading e-retailers
every 10 minutes for a period of four weeks during April 2004.
Two measures were used to profile this functionality – HTTP errors
and response time. These highlight the two main failure areas: HTTP errors,
which make it impossible for an e-consumer to complete a purchase; and
response times greater than 30 seconds for HTML download, causing the
majority of e-consumers to abandon the transaction or assume an error
has occurred. The entire purchase process was tracked but only the last
step of the transaction process was profiled in the study.
HTTP errors (causing more serious problems for consumers) rather than
timeouts were the major cause for shopping cart failure. This contrasts
with the misconception that slow page delivery and timeouts occur more
commonly than HTTP failures.
Recommendations
Based on the findings, SciVisum made a number of broad recommendations
to improve the ‘add to cart/basket’ function of web sites:
1. Review the ‘add to cart’ function of your website to ensure
that the server load is kept to a minimum. For example firstly strip any
HTTP ‘POST’ data down so that only essential variables are
passed within it, such as the product part number; and secondly avoid
changing cookies at this crucial stage of the purchase process.
2. Analyse web systems for ‘database locking’ flaws, which
can produce errors at load levels well below the capacity of the server
hardware; and require ‘high simultaneity’ testing of each
function to be identified.
3. 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 too high.
4. Implement a regular monitoring and test programme that exercises complex
functionality and multi-step user transactions as well as basic pages
over time – to help identify as soon as possible when the system
is struggling. Symptoms will include increasing failure percentages although
page-average measures may be steady.
- ends-
About SciVisum
SciVisum is a UK based web site testing specialist offering engineered
monitoring and testing services to help organisations measure and improve
the performance, functionality and resulting user experience of business
critical Web based systems. The company’s in-house research and
development, and an unique test methodology enable cost effective in-depth
testing and monitoring of complex web based applications. This includes
sophisticated web systems and functionality such as online order processing,
shopping carts, banking applications, auction systems, intranets, extranets
and online billing.
SciVisum services include: 24/7 Monitoring, Load/Stress Testing, Functional
Audits, to identify opportunities for optimisation and Accessibility Testing,
to meet the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act.
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