£5.65 billion per year lost to poor web experiences

Consumers are abandoning online transactions due to poorly performing websites, according to recent research by Hostway and Zeus Technology retailers could possible be losing up to £5.65 billion per year in lost sales.
The survey of 2,033 consumers highlighted that on average consumers abandoned 5.5 online transactions per person over the last 12 months. With [...]

Making Users Buy Online – The Importance of Building Online Trust

By Martin Rosenmejer,
User Experience Research Consultant
at fhios.
With online sales rising to 9.8% of the total retail sales in the UK in 2008* and 12.6% of businesses selling online (Office of National Statistics), the role of company websites is still enhancing often becoming a central part of the offered customer experience.
In order to make people purchasing [...]

Poor weather extends the internet Christmas shopping boom

There still seems to be no sign of the festive online shopping boom tailing off, with figures from John Lewis and price comparison service InvisibleHand both indicating on-going growth in the market.
John Lewis’ latest weekly trading figures show that online sales were up by over 50% on a year ago. “It is in weeks such [...]

Top 20 retail sites: UK

Search terms ranked by visits for week ending 14th Nov 2009

eBay UK – 19.05%
Amazon UK – 6.25%
Argos – 2.28%
Play.com – 1.87%
Marks & Spencer – 1.13%
Tesco.com – 1.07%
Tesco Direct – 0.91%
Amazon.com – 0.89%
eBay.com – 0.86%
John Lewis – 0.82%
Next – 0.76%
HotUKDeals – 0.64%
Sainsbury’s – 0.6%
Gumtree – 0.55%
ASOS – 54%
GAME – 54%
HMV.com – 52%
Tesco entertainment – 52%
ASDA – [...]

Domino’s Pizza online sales soar 40%

Domino’s Pizza’s focus on online sales in the past year has proved fruitful for the fast-food business, with internet sales up 40.4%, accounting for just under 30% of all its UK delivered sales.
The pizza delivery business has experienced across-the-board expansion, with internet sales increasing for the fourth quarter and the year, the company’s 4th quarter [...]

Vodafone Launch Experimental Retail Campaign

Working alongside Fitch, Vodafone have taken an interesting approach to retail design in Qatar. Where the retail experience is a national past-time and the telecom industry is highly regulated and monopolized. Vodafone is showing ambition to have themselves become the country’s most-admired mobile carrier.
Fitch has taken Vodafone’s three flagship stores, all of which are designed [...]

Customer Satisfaction survey for Online Retail Christmas 2009

By Andrew Horsfall,
Marketing Assistant
at fhios.
This years’ customer satisfaction survey from ForeSee Results research unveiled that customer satisfaction for the top retailers had increased by 6% from last year. All of the 40 online retail websites in the study saw some sort of increase.
The Index measured four high level factors that affect overall customer satisfaction:

Functionality
Price
Merchandise
Content

Over [...]

Shoppers spend 94% more per order online in 2009

A Coremetrics Benchmark Survey of 150 top online retailers in the UK reveals online shoppers favour the end of the week and are ordering more goods with a higher average item value.
The average online order has increased 54 percent since 2007.  However, the effect of the recession on consumer spending last year is clearly visible [...]

UK retailers maintain strong site availability and response times on Cyber Monday

Significant improvements in the reliability of top online retailers’ websites continued again this Monday, as shoppers descended on the internet for a £350 million Christmas shopping bonanza.
Of the thirteen in Keynote Systems‘ basket of top retailers, eight managed 100% site availability — Argos, Bhs, Debenhams, Hamleys, House of Fraser, Play, Selfridges and Tesco Direct. Amazon [...]

Top U.K. Retail Sites

Across the month of November, average weekly visits to online retail sites grew 35% in the UK compared to the typical shopping week from the prior two months. Of the top 5 online retailers as ranked by average weekly visits across the month of November, Play.com sites experienced the largest growth on the base period [...]