Asos is a big winner recently
The UK’s top online retailers have performed incredibly well in the first quarter of this year. Improvements have been made in website speed and downtime has been slashed. This news comes as it transpires online retailers in Britain enjoyed a bumper March with figures revealing a 16% rise in sales on last year.
But the performance figures, released by NCC Group have identified a chasm between the UK’s top ten busiest ecommerce sites and those who follow behind in the top 50.
NCC Group’s quarterly online retail report analyses the web performance of the UK’s busiest retail websites such as ASOS and John Lewis. It found that the top ten improved their download speed with an average of 4.66 seconds on a 2 Mbps connection compared with 4.9 seconds in the last quarter of 2012. On average however, the top 50 were almost two seconds slower at 6.27 seconds.
Downtime was also measured, referring to the time when the system is unavailable to shoppers. The top ten recorded an average downtime of just 1.5 minutes, a massive improvement from 6.5 minutes in Q4 of 2012. Meanwhile, the top 50 came in with an average of 3 hours and 23 minutes. Bad news for the top 50 as any outage equates to lost custom.
“Once again we’re seeing the clear link between website performance and popularity. The busiest e-tailers are those which give their users the best web experience,” says Bob Dowson, director at NCC Group’s website performance division.
“There’s so much opportunity for growth in the e-commerce sector but firms need to realise the importance of user experience. Customers will vote with their feet if a website is slow to load or down altogether.
“E-tailers need to take the lead from the giants in the industry and place more focus on website optimisation. This relationship between traffic volume and performance isn’t a coincidence – website performance holds the key to success.
Speak Your Mind