JD Sports, M&S, Amazon and John Lewis are the e-commerce sites that other retailers need to look up to, according to an eDigital benchmark study.
In the mystery shopper survey, which looks at the end to end user experience of 49 e-commerce sites in the UK, many of the sites performed well for areas such as search and navigation and the purchase process, but email customer service, as always, lowered the average scores.
Top performers
JD Sports was strong all round, coming top across all of the customer touchpoints measured in the survey. JD scored well for its checkout process and customer service, as well as product pages, an area where scores were mixed.
Here's one of JD Sports' product pages, and it does follow best practice well, with some excellent product photos from different angles, as well as very clear delivery and returns information. I would make that call to action clearer though:
Trends from the survey
The best scores for etailers were in the search and navigation category, thanks to effective site search tools, clear navigation, and effective filtering and refining of results. The best performers in this category were M&S and HMV for site search, while New Look and Figleaves scored highest for navigation.
There were some variable results though, with the biggest customer bugbears being irrelevant search results and inadequate filtering and sorting options.
The biggest area of concern was in email customer service, where some response times are nowhere near good enough; just 29% of emails found a reply within 12 hours.
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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12:49PM on 27th May 2010
Well done JD Sports!
Unless I missed something, report did not actually show how many users took part in this study?
Four out of the top 20 use IBM's websphere commerce (including JD), so technically there should be no big difference in how their onsite search, navigation or how the checkout process functions.
1:09PM on 27th May 2010
I thought Woolworth's went bankrupt 18 months ago? Do they still exist on line?
Head of Direct at Lyle & Scott Ltd
1:40PM on 27th May 2010
Hi Darren - The Woolworths brand was bought out of administration by ShopDirect (Littlewoods)
12:36AM on 28th May 2010
There can be quite a significant different between between each sites Search and Navigation depending on if the clients sites uses just the base eCommerce application or integrated best of breed offerings. Well Done to JD
10:41AM on 22nd December 2010
very interesting. also teh link to the call to action study. i will test it on my web