User Experience Benchmarking for E-Commerce
We have benchmarked over 250 intranets since 2002. Now we've applied our expertise to e-commerce sites, giving unprecedented comparisons of user experience between individual sites and an overview of market segments as a whole.
There are two reports to choose from - download them or read brief highlights below. (The reports are in Acrobat format, so you will need the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe.)
Also on this page:
UK Mobile Phone e-Commerce (2009)
Our first report addressed the UK mobile phone industry and included 12 leading vendors: Argos, Carphone Warehouse, Expansys, mobiles.co.uk, O2, Orange, phones4u, Tesco, T-Mobile, Three, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone.
View or download the summary report (PDF, 5.8 MB)
US/UK Clothing e-Commerce (2010)
Our latest report looks at the top six clothing e-tailers (by site traffic) in the US and UK (12 in total). The results show a much broader range of scores than we saw for UK mobile phones, with some surprising extremes. On average, the UK sites fared slightly better than the US, but if not for Zappos, the scores would have been heavily balanced in the UK's favour, calling into doubt any suggestion that the UK lags the US in all things internet.
View or download the summary report (PDF, 3.3 MB)
Our benchmarking approach involves 67 metrics split into 13 groups:
- Content
- Visual Design
- Navigation
- Engagement
- Accessibility
- Trust
- Persuasion
- Shopping Basket
- Search
- Selection
- Checkout
- Account Management
- Online Support
Both reports are over 50 pages long and provide group scores for each of the sites with numerous examples of good and bad solutions to the user experience issues examined. Most are illustrated with screenshots – the reports include over 60 on average.
Who should read these reports?
"The folks at Syntagm have done it again and produced another outstanding analysis, this time of the UK Mobile Phone e-Commerce market. This detailed summary shows exactly why it's critical to design your web site well, and how the best players in the mobile space are doing it today. They also point out some important areas where innovation and good design practice can gain a serious advantage. If you're in the mobile phone e-commerce business, you need to read this report."
Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
Our reports are intended for a broad audience from CEO's and CIO's right through to web developers:
Benchmarked site owners. If you are one of the sites we have already benchmarked, the summary report will show you how you compare with your peers in each of the 13 metrics groups. This will immediately highlight your strengths and weaknesses and help you to prioritise development plans.
Other site owners. If you are not included in our report, contact us to discuss being benchmarked. In the meantime, the summary report will show you the important user experience issues and how they are being handled by a variety of sites.
Design, usability or user-experience agencies. If you are involved in a new design or helping clients to decide what improvements should take priority, our report will help you decide where some of the biggest opportunities lie.
Site-specific reports
The summary report includes group scores and a general discussion of the sites evaluated. Our site-specific reports show
- detailed scores for a single site across all 67 metrics
- standardized scores relative to the average performance of all 12 sites
- standardized scores relative to two named sites of your choice
The site-specific report also includes presentation and a workshop to help you get the best from our analysis.
Is your organisation not in our benchmark list? We can benchmark additional sites as required. Contact us for further details.
Intranets
We have applied a similar approach to benchmarking intranets. Contact us for more details.