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By Kate Hanaghan, 13 March 2002 16:00

NEWS British high-street retailers are failing to do enough to keep visitors coming back to their websites. In a Jupiter MMXI survey measuring customer loyalty, Amazon ruled the roost in the UK with a retention rate of 40 per cent. This means that 40 per cent of visitors in November visited the site again within three months. Meanwhile, clicks and mortar retailers Argos, Comet and John Lewis languish well below these rates. Argos has a retention rate of 16.2 per cent, while John Lewis managed 13.6 per cent and Comet 12 per cent. Staffan Engdegard, Jupiter's MMXI advertising and marketing analyst, told silicon.com: "These figures can definitely be improved to well over 20 per cent." November is an extremely busy month for both e-tailers and real-world shops. Jupiter MMXI wanted to measure to what extent these companies took advantage of the huge influx of custom in this month. Unlike Argos and Comet the John Lewis site is very new. It was set-up in October 2001 and has since integrated the now defunct buy.com. Murray Hennessy, managing director of John Lewis Direct, told silicon.com: "We're thrilled with that repeat rate. It's one of our statistics that we're most proud of." He explained that the company hopes to attract repeat and new customer by doubling the number of products on the site to between 11,000 and 12,000. Engdegard's advice to e-tailers is to perform a loss analysis to establish how and where visitors are being lost and to shift more of the overall marketing budget to ensuring retention. The survey of European countries by Jupiter MMXI looked at visitor figures for November 2001 and monitored retention rates over the following three months. Tesco.com, with its highly successful grocery site and delivery system managed 34.5 per cent.