|
Hidden Web Site Errors Costing E-tailers Big Money
By Sharon Gaudin
August 15, 2003
Web site errors are driving off customers and losing companies big money,
according to a new study.
Small business retailers can learn from the mistakes of the Internet's
biggest retailers, a majority of which are suffering from undetected Web
site problems that are costing them an average of $275 in sales per shopper.
Those are the results of a recent study done by the Business Internet Group
of San Francisco, a networking and research organized focused on e-business.
"It continues to amaze me that although the Internet has clearly come
of age as a sales channel, we continue to find revenue-draining Web failures
on the very retail sites that are considered the Internet's most celebrated
success stories," says Diane Smith, an analyst with the Business Internet
Group. "We are all so busy patting ourselves on the back for the achievement
of 100 percent uptime we are missing a critical truth. Without the ability
to see what sites are delivering to the real end user, 24/7 uptime is a
worthless metric."
The study found that 62 percent of the online sites monitored experienced
some sort of error during the user's shopping experience, interfering with
or preventing the completion of the purchase process. Of the Web application
errors noted, the Group reports that none were detectable by traditional
performance or availability monitoring solutions.
The average user spent seven minutes on a site with errors.
The Group's report notes that analysts found instances where a customer
was unable to buy a product after conducting a product comparison. Other
common failures noted were blank pages, wrong pages, and wrong items being
presented.
"With entire conferences devoted to analyzing consumer behavior in order
to solve the issue of abandoned shopping carts, it is ironic that the answer
is often as simple and obvious as a glitch in an online application," says
Smith. "What most Internet retailers don't realize is that customers are
visiting their online storefronts only to find the lights on but nobody
at the cash register."
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news
|
