Poor website performance hitting the bottom line

A survey by web analysts Verdict Consulting has revealed that the UK's top 52 online retailers lost £87m over the Christmas period because of poorly performing websites.

Verdict estimated that, if the problems are not rectified, UK business could lose £226m during the whole of 2006.

The most common problems were the failure of web pages to load, and transactions taking so long that buyers logged out and went somewhere else.

"If the thought of losing £226m in sales isn't shocking enough, retailers must realise that lost sales can be just the tip of the iceberg," said Mark Collyer, market development director at IT services group Xansa, which co-sponsored the research.
"There are many factors that affect the perception of a brand and influence buying decisions across channels.

"A retailer is judged on all aspects of interaction, so a shoddy, slow or unavailable website is going to cut much deeper than just the lost sale."

Up to 17 per cent of retailers faced some form of website downtime, and nearly 10 per cent of those experienced several hours of outage.

Some 15 per cent of those surveyed admitted to slow website performance over the festive season, and seven per cent faced issues for up to a week.