London – 23 May 2005 – Amazon.co.uk has come out on top in a study of UK e-commerce sites conducted by Keynote Systems, the Internet Performance Authority®. Conducted throughout March 2005, Keynote’s comprehensive Customer Experience (CE) study, which tracked the attitudes and behaviour of over 500 UK web shoppers, found that Amazon delivered by far the best overall customer experience. This ranking was based on customer satisfaction, price satisfaction, purchase processes, product research facilities and perceived site performance. The second best overall performer was Comet, with eBay ranked in third place.
Faring less well were websites John Lewis and high street strugglers, Boots, Dixons and Marks & Spencer. Study participants ranked these as the poorest sites for delivering a positive customer experience. Visitors to these sites were less likely to go on to purchase products, return at a later date, recommend the site to others or use the site for product research.
Keynote’s Customer Experience (CE) Rankings are based on research with over 500 consumers as they evaluated and interacted with leading UK retail websites. In addition to attitudinal data, Keynote’s proprietary research technology collects detailed qualitative and behavioural data as customers perform tasks at each site.
UK Online Shoppers Focused on Price
Keynote’s CE Rankings also found that UK consumers are primarily looking for price satisfaction when shopping online. In this category, Amazon, Argos and eBay came out as the most competitive online brands, while traditional high street stores John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Boots offered customers the least price satisfaction.
The second most important reason for consumers to choose to buy from one site over another is visual appeal. Conversely, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis scored well in this category and, alongside Amazon, were ranked as the top performers. Argos, Dixons and Comet ranked in the bottom three.
A list of other site attributes driving consumers to purchase from a particular website (including the best and worst ranked UK performers) follows:
| Website Attribute | Top Performing Site | Poorest Performing Site |
|---|---|---|
| Price satisfaction | Amazon | John Lewis |
| Visual appeal | Marks & Spencer | Argos |
| Product interest | Comet | John Lewis |
| Search satisfaction | Comet | Boots |
| Organisation / navigation | Comet | Boots |
“UK consumers are first and foremost driven by cost; they expect websites to undercut high street store prices, and if they don’t, they’re likely to look elsewhere. It’s unsurprising that Amazon – the company rated as offering the best online prices – is also ranked as the most customer-savvy site in the UK,” said Bonny Brown, director of research, Keynote. “The look and feel of a website is an important factor too, but consumers are not impressed by style alone. While John Lewis and Marks & Spencer have developed good-looking sites, they fall behind in other areas – particularly pricing, product interest and search satisfaction.”
UK consumers consider online customer support largely unimportant when it comes to choosing where to shop online. Customer support came out as the least important driver for delivering a positive customer experience. Even though eBay and Amazon scored poorly in this category, it had little bearing on their overall customer experience scores.
UK Shoppers Frustrated By Cumbersome Registration Processes
The Keynote research also measured which website characteristics turned off potential customers. The top frustrations encountered were as follows:
| Rank | Frustration | Percentage of Shoppers Put Off |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Forced registration in order to purchase | 27% |
| 2 | Difficult to compare items offered | 20% |
| 3 | Inadequate customer ratings / reviews | 19% |
| 4= | Product information not detailed enough | 15% |
| 4= | Inadequate expert ratings / reviews | 15% |
| 6= | Site made no suggestions to help improve search | 13% |
| 6= | Difficult to go back and forth between items (repeat search required) | 13% |
| 6= | Inadequate product descriptions / photos | 13% |
Research results show that the websites belonging to Comet, Amazon and Marks & Spencer caused the least customer frustrations. Indeed, on the whole, UK sites threw up fewer frustrations than their US equivalents. UK surfers experienced an average of 5.9 frustrations per site visit; in a similar survey conducted by Keynote in the US, surfers complained of 6.1 frustrations per visit.
“Innovations such as one-time registration, product comparisons and customer reviews have become standard features on forward-thinking websites. These have raised the bar in terms of customer expectations – if these features aren’t incorporated into a site’s design, consumers often end up disappointed and less likely to purchase products either immediately or in the future,” continued Brown. “UK consumers tend to be less frustrated by the general online shopping experience than their US counterparts, although this might not necessarily be due to the quality of UK websites. It could well be because US consumers have much more exacting standards than UK shoppers.”
The UK websites of Amazon, Argos, Boots, Comet, Dixons, eBay, John Lewis and Marks & Spencer were evaluated as part of Keynote’s study of UK retail sites.
The Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings for the UK Online Retail Industry is a competitive benchmarking study available for purchase. The complete study provides hundreds of additional data points and a detailed analysis of study findings. For more information or to purchase the complete report contact Andy Didcott at 0207 887 4531 or email or visit: http://www.keynote.com/sbl_forms/literature_uk_retailers.html.
Keynote Customer Experience Research
Keynote is the leading provider of customer experience research services, offering both syndicated and custom research examining consumer behaviour on the Web. Keynote’s research provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies for a variety of vertical industries. In addition to traditional opinion data, Keynote’s proprietary research technology and access to a panel of 160,000+ consumers allows for the collection of detailed qualitative and behavioural data that inform its research.
The Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings are Keynote’s competitive benchmarking studies, which rank the leading Web sites in a specific industry in terms of the customer experience they provide. Keynote CE Rankings are available for a number of industries including the retail, banking and credit card industries, as well as several travel verticals, including the lodging, cruise and rental car industries.
To learn more about Keynote’s competitive research offerings and for a list of the various vertical industry studies that are available, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/cem_syndicated_research.html.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over 2,100 corporate IT and marketing departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s growing range of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services to improve e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.
Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 60 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.
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