JD Sports is the best UK e-commerce site: study

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.