Britain is a 'nation of online shoppers'
14/12/2011 17:00:00
Ofcom's latest International Communications Market study has discovered that Britain is a ‘nation of online shoppers’, spending an average of 84 minutes a month browsing online retailers.
Yet the web performance of many leading e-tailers is declining. Website monitoring and load testing firm, Site Confidence, records download speeds and downtime across the UK’s top 50 e-tailers and has observed long outages and sluggish download speeds throughout the year. (Survey results below).
Bob Dowson, director at Site Confidence comments:
“Whether shopping is online or on the street the customer experience is paramount. This should be a wake-up call for the many e-tailers that still don’t realise that.
“The UK online shopping space is clearly a fantastic business opportunity, but many sites still aren’t capitalising on it. Competition is so fierce that even a few seconds of sluggish performance drives customers away in droves. As shopping habits shift online it’s important for e-tailers to keep up – websites are no longer sidelines to physical stores, they’re the main events.
“Over the course of 2011 we’ve seen downtime increasing and websites getting slower – whilst download speeds seemed to improve in the third quarter we will have to wait until after Christmas to see if they’ve been sustained. E-tailers’ web monitoring just hasn’t moved at the same rate as the shift to online shopping, and this needs to change.
“There’s a lot of talk currently about how to improve the high street experience – it needs to be applied to the online arena too.”
Performance data (top 50 UK e-tailers)
01/01/2011 – 31/03/2011
Average downtime: 2 hours 44 minutes
Average download speed: 11.82 seconds (2 Mbps connection speed)
01/04/2011 – 30/06/2011
Average downtime: 3 hours 41 minutes
Average download speed: 12.47 seconds
01/07/2011 – 30/09/2011
Average downtime: 15 hours 44 minutes (3 hours 42 minutes with results over 10 days removed)
Average download speed: 6.08 seconds
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