iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Faulty shopping cart software is leaving consumers stranded at the checkout of many UK websites.
The majority of shopping carts provide consumers with an unpredictable and unsatisfactory experience – making Web shopping a lottery, according to a survey by web testing specialist SciVisum out this week. SciVisum found that 80 per cent of websites perform inconsistently with widely varying response times, timeouts and errors – leaving consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to complete their purchase successfully.

These shortcomings might potentially cost e-retailers millions in lost sales. SciVisum believes that bad website performance will cost merchants at least £225m in 2004 if they don’t get their act together.

The SciVisum Ecommerce Performance Study tested the online buying process, specifically the ‘add to cart/basket’ function, of the web sites of more than 50 of the UK’s leading e-retailers for a period of four weeks during April 2004. It also identified daily and weekly trends in online shopping and industry wide peak shopping times for e-consumers.

The testing showed that the ‘add to cart/basket’ step failed to function correctly in more than one in 100 cases. SciVisum believes this is just the tip of the iceberg, since consumers typically buy 2/3 items at a time and perform multiple steps to complete a purchase, so the true number of consumers let down will be more than one in 20.

HTTP errors (causing more serious problems for consumers) rather than response time failures were the major cause for shopping cart malfunctions during the study. This contrasts with the common misperception that slow page delivery and timeouts occur more commonly than HTTP failures.

One in five carts tested did not function for 12 or more hours a month and over three quarters failed to meet the standard service level of availability of 99.9 per cent uptime. A leading DIY chain had shopping carts that failed to work for more than four days during the study, making it the worst performer.

Only 20 per cent of shopping carts were able to handle daily and weekly traffic patterns consistently. The best performers included John Lewis, Waitrose Direct Wines, Orange, Figleaves and WHSmith.

Amazon.com congratulated itself on a bumper holiday shopping season, saying more than 2.8m items were ordered on a single, record-breaking day

“We are extremely grateful to our customers,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

I got an iLap for christmas. I had considered one and thought it was a bit gadgety, but actually it makes sitting on the sofa with my laptop amazingly comfortable. Highly recommended.

Surprisingly it was apparently way cheaper to Fedex from California than buy from the UK suppliers. Happy Christmas

Its all over the news that Amazon have hit problems with some orders. I’m waiting on a book that seems to be delayed at the publishers google hacks – its not for christmas, but they sent me a ?5 voucher anyway this morning. Amazon used to send out out vouchers like candy, but they stoppped this a few years ago, and they lowered the general value to ?2 unless something awful had gone wrong, so it looks like anyone with a delayed order got a voucher this morning. Ouch.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple sues ‘Tiger’ file sharers

Apple sues ‘Tiger’ file sharers – don’t use torrent for p2p dowloads of Tiger then. Am looking forward to macworld though and a potential new g5 purchase once the new products are announced.