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An increasing amount of shopping is done online.<\/p>\nAn increasing amount of shopping is done online.<\/p>\n
Almost $100 billion<\/a> worth of products were sold online during the two-month Christmas buying season of 2016.<\/p>\n It\u2019s become especially easy for consumers to find the lowest price on a product.<\/p>\n If consumers can\u2019t find needed information, purchase a product easily, or don\u2019t trust the brand or information on a website, they go elsewhere and may tell friends and colleagues about the poor experience.<\/p>\n The quality of the website experience continues to be a key differentiator for online retailers. It\u2019s become increasingly important for retailers to benchmark the user experience and make changes based on the findings.<\/p>\n To understand the quality of the online retail experience, we collected UX benchmark metrics<\/a> on ten popular retail websites.<\/p>\n A good benchmark indicates where a website falls relative to the competition and is an essential step to take<\/a> in understanding how any design changes contribute to a quantifiable improvement, which ultimately leads to an increase in website revenue<\/a>.<\/p>\n A website UX benchmark consists of a tiered services, as shown in Figure 1.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Figure 1<\/strong>: Hierarchy and relationship of data collected in UX benchmark studies.<\/p>\n Figure 1 shows two things. First, overall website attitudes are affected by task metrics, which in turn are affected by interactions on the website. Second, website attitudes are affected by other variables outside the task experience (brand, prior experiences, etc.).<\/p>\n All three levels are important to collect. Our benchmark report<\/a> collects the outer ring and provides a good comparison set of numbers for all retailers in their benchmarking efforts and usability tests.<\/p>\n We had 935 participants reflect on their most recent experience from Oct and Nov. 2016 on one of the ten retail websites and answer the 8-item SUPR-Q<\/a> (including the Net Promoter Score<\/a>).\u00a0 Participants also reflected on functionality that contributes to a successful retail experience, including using the cart, product filters, and reviews.<\/p>\n More details on the study are available in the report<\/a>; here are the highlights of what we found.<\/p>\n The SUPR-Q<\/a> is a standardized measure of the quality of a website\u2019s user experience and is a good way to gauge website attitudes (the outer layer in Figure 1). It\u2019s based on a rolling database of 200 websites, so scores are percentile ranks and tells you how a website experience ranks relative to the other websites. The SUPR-Q provides an overall score as well as detailed scores for subdimensions of trust, usability, appearance, and loyalty.<\/p>\n In general, the retail websites in this study scored high across all dimensions with the industry average at the 78th<\/sup> percentile. As we saw in 2013<\/a>, Amazon led the pack and scored at the 99th percentile. It\u2019s not much of a surprise given Amazon\u2019s dominance in the online retail space<\/a>. Walmart had the lowest SUPR-Q score of the group in the 71st<\/sup> percentile.<\/p>\n If people don\u2019t trust the brand<\/a> or information on a website, it affects their likelihood to purchase and recommend. While Amazon had the highest trust scores, Target had virtually the same trust score, despite having a lower overall SUPR-Q score, suggesting a generally high amount of relative trust for this big-box retailer.<\/p>\n While all of Amazon\u2019s scores were high, its lowest score came in the trust subscale. Participants in the study mentioned that sometimes reviews are untrustworthy and it can be difficult to deal with third-party vendors and individual sellers. Two participants articulated this sentiment:<\/p>\n \u201cSome reviews are untrustworthy\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDealing with other sellers can be difficult because of inconsistency in the experience\u201d<\/p>\n Similar comments were made about Etsy, which had the second lowest trust scores of the group.<\/p>\n \u201cYou never know quality of a product when they all come from different vendors\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome sellers are hard to deal with\u201d<\/p>\n Amazon again had the highest usability scores at the 98th<\/sup> percentile. The usability factor on the SUPR-Q accurately predicts a SUS score<\/a>; in Amazon\u2019s case, it\u2019s a SUS equivalent score of 85. Both Best Buy and Nordstrom had the lowest standardized usability scores at the 72nd<\/sup> percentile (a SUS equivalent of 77).<\/p>\n The visual appeal of a website affects attitude toward the brand. There is even some evidence that the usability of a website affects attitude toward the visual appeal<\/a>. It\u2019s not surprising to see that Amazon and Etsy both had the highest scores on appearance (as they were among the highest usability scores). Bed Bath and Beyond had one of the lowest appearance scores with participants\u2019 comments reinforcing their ratings:<\/p>\n \u201c[Bed Bath and Beyond has a] cluttered design\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c[The] design is not aesthetically pleasing\u201d<\/p>\n The Net Promoter Score (NPS) continues to be a popular measure of loyalty<\/a>; for this group, the average NPS was 10%. Amazon again rose above the rest with an NPS of 67%, followed by Etsy with an NPS of 44%. Walmart had the lowest NPS at -35% (more detractors than promoters). Loyalty is highly affected by prior experience and this sample tended to have participants with more experience on Amazon and the least on Walmart (more details on the sample are available in the report<\/a>).<\/p>\n In general, users are looking for products<\/a> to purchase. If we think about the purchase process using the classic sales funnel, we can break down the activities into browsing, narrowing, and purchasing.<\/p>\n Across the websites, at any given time, 66% of participants report only browsing compared to 17% actually making a purchase. These numbers are virtually unchanged from our 2013 findings<\/a>. That is, users on retail websites are four times more likely to browse than buy, and this statistic seems to hold both during and before the busy holiday buying seasons.<\/p>\n Digging into the narrowing phase, we found that some 7% of consumers reported looking for sales or deals, 3% comparing prices, and a long tail of tasks including looking at in-store availability (when applicable) and 6% managing a drug prescription (Walgreens and Walmart).<\/p>\n The SUPR-Q provides a broader measure of the overall website user experience (loosely referred to as UX quality). But the SUPR-Q, like most standardized measures<\/a>, is not meant to be diagnostic. To understand what elements in the experience are likely affecting SUPR-Q scores, we conducted a key driver analysis<\/a> on more specific \u201ccomponents\u201d of the retail website experience.<\/p>\n Participants responded to 19 \u201ccomponent\u201d items that asked about shopping and purchasing using a 5-point Likert-type scale<\/a> and one brand-attitude item on a 7-point scale. Of the 19 items, 9 are key drivers<\/a> of the SUPR-Q and explain 74% of the variability in scores. The 19 items with key drivers highlighted are shown below. How each website scored on each component is available in the report<\/a>.<\/p>\n Component key drivers<\/p>\n Other component items:<\/p>\n Figure 2 shows the proportion of SUPR-Q scores for each of the key drivers.\u00a0 For example, the ease of finding and using the cart (“Easy to find cart”) explains 10% of the SUPR-Q scores\u2014which is twice as important as product specs being easy to use, which explains 5% of the variation in SUPR-Q scores.<\/p>\nBenchmarking the Retail Website Experience<\/h2>\n
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<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Study<\/h2>\n
Quality of the Overall User Experience: SUPR-Q<\/h3>\n
Trust<\/h3>\n
Usability<\/h3>\n
Appearance<\/h3>\n
Loyalty\/Net Promoter Score<\/h3>\n
Browsing vs. Buying<\/h2>\n
Key Drivers of UX Quality<\/h2>\n
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Figure 2<\/strong>: Key drivers of the retail website user experience (SUPR-Q).<\/p>\n