By Will Sturgeon, 19 December 2003 12:05
NEWS While e-tailers will doubtless be counting their takings from bumper Christmas sales well into the new year, they'd do well to invest some of it back into their websites according to the findings of research conducted by Empirix on behalf of silicon.com.
Empirix monitored the websites of 10 of the UK's biggest and best retailers and found many were failing to take all the hassle out of Christmas shopping.
Shopping online is still far easier than battling it out on the high street but many sites are still plagued with problems at peak times.
For example shoppers accessing the website of electrical retailer Comet were kept waiting up to 29 seconds during peak times, while anybody looking for some booze from Virgin Wines ran the risk of a 28 second wait for pages to download during the site's busiest times.
Sainsbury's website took 25 seconds to access at peak times while lingerie site Figleaves.com kept shoppers waiting 22.5 seconds. Carphone Warehouse weighed in with a time-consuming 24.7 seconds while lastminute.com was similarly struggling at times with waits of almost 20 seconds.
And reliability was also an issue. Only BOL, Carphone Warehouse and gadget heaven Firebox.com were available 100 per cent of the time in the run up to Christmas.
Worst offender was Virgin Wines which experienced uptime of just 97.69 per cent - a far cry from the five nines ideal (99.999 per cent). However it would appear reliability is often traded off against speed.
And there's not even any justification for claiming speed has been traded off against greater reliability. Firebox.com shone in both categories - with an average download time of 2.44 seconds and 100 per cent uptime.
Other impressive average downloads times included Sainsbury's, which despite struggling at busy times still averaged out at 1.68 seconds. Argos was second fastest with an impressive 1.98 seconds. Worst of the bunch was BOL which averaged out at 8.03 seconds - though that was only marginally worse than Amazon.co.uk (7.75 seconds).
One shopper contacted by silicon.com said: "I tend to only go to two major sites: Amazon and Virgin Wines. I expect them to be 100 per cent reliable."
However, it's a fact of life that problems occur and often companies can gain even more fans by the way they handle them.
"I've never had a problem with Amazon and only once did the Virgin site crash," the shopper told silicon.com. "If you fail to complete a transaction with Virgin one of their sales reps calls you within a few hours and asks you what the problem was."
Scott Miller, VP European Operations, Empirix said: It is no longer acceptable to have retail ecommerce sites that are unavailable at any time of day. Online business can fulfil the dream of shopping anytime but the results of our study show that reality is somewhat different. In many industries, 'five nines' reliability is the measure of quality a 99.999 per cent success rate. Sites should be pitching for this one error in 10,000, not one in 50."
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Bah Humbug, another sales pitch masquerading as a news item! I can hear the sound of printers whirring as 100's of bosses print out the article and drop it on their pet techies desks with the hand written scrawl " where do we rank in this?" post noted on.
Oh joy..... (and before you ask, we did quite well thank you)
2. anonymous
agree that this is a cheap shot at generating business. It would be good to see the data....
3. anonymous
I ordered items on-line from PC World on 18.12.
Now if anyone should be "with-it" technologically, they certainly should.
After ordering I was informed that the items may not be delivered before Christmas and that I would receive an email confirming actual delivery date.
Today, 4 days later they still can't advise me of a delivery date.
Perhaps I expect too much but I always thought that a major advantage of e-tailing was the speed of information and processing, - silly me!
4. Ian Manzie
How can you rely on a survey like this when it doesnt mention one of the UK's leading etailers -Tesco and doesnt give figures for Amazon.
(Ed note. Have another look Ian - there are a couple of mentions of Amazon, including the average time taken to access the site, which you would also have been able to find in our leader on the findings, published on the same day.)