silicon.com e-tail survey: Dot-coms trounce clicks and mortars

While 90 per cent of all online shopping transactions in December were successfully processed, the degree of efficiency varied, according to the final results of a Christmas e-tail survey conducted exclusively for silicon.com by web monitoring company Mercury Interactive.

Companies were rated on the speed and efficiency with which customers could access the home page and complete a transaction.

The survey looked at ten leading retail sites, and while the majority of transactions were completed, only a quarter of them managed to process a web transaction in less than 90 seconds.

Over 60 per cent of the transactions were classified as borderline (up to three minutes) or poor (over three minutes). Clicks and mortar sites like WHSmith, HMV and Waterstones trailed near the bottom of the league while Virgin's US music site, virginmega (the company has no UK site), earned the title of poorest performer overall.

Amazon.co.uk won its overall winner tag with service availability close to 100 per cent for the whole of December and rapid transaction times. BOL emerged as a close runner up.

In the busiest days before Christmas high volume traffic began to take a toll on some sites. On 19 December it took over seven minutes to buy a book on the WHSmith website. This was also one of Amazon's busiest days, yet it took just over two and a half minutes to complete a transaction on its site.

On 22 December customers could have waited over nine and a half minutes to buy a CD on the Virginmegastore site. On the same day they could have ordered a book from Waterstones in just 63.88 seconds.

Deliveries would have reached Santa's stocking in time with nine out ten sites delivering by 22 December, after receiving orders on 7 December. However, on one occasion WHSmith delivered twice, and charged both times. Only Waterstones missed the deadline with a book ordered on December 11 arriving on January 2.

Mercury Interactive's transaction figures show the average time it takes to purchase one copy of the bestselling book or CD from each site, starting at the homepage and continuing to credit card validation - assuming the buyer doesn't accept cookies and isn't registered with the site. Since measurement began on 4 December, Mercury has conducted over 20,000 transactions.

The ten sites being monitored were:
amazon.co.uk
etoys.co.uk
hmv.co.uk
jungle.com
streetsonline.co.uk
waterstones.co.uk
whsmith.co.uk
woolworths.co.uk
uk.bol.com
virginmega.com

silicon.com also wants to hear from you about your online buying experiences. Have you had problems or are the complaints out of proportion? Do you just not bother buying online at all?
Send the best and worst of your e-tailing experiences to: editorial@silicon.com

For more information on Mercury Interactive, visit http://www.mercuryinteractive.co.uk .