Best Buy Co. Inc., Home Depot Inc. and Target Corp. have the best mobile shopping sites among eight major retailers, according to a new study.
User experience research platform UserTesting released “Retail Mobile Customer Experience Index” today at the 2017 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, which runs through Friday at McCormick Place in Chicago.
In the study, condcuted April 19-May 5, 800 consumers (100 per retailer) evaluated five factors—ease of use, speed, credibility, aesthetics and delight—for the following eight retailers’ mobile websites:
- Best Buy, No. 10 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000
- Costco Wholesale Corp (No. 9)
- Lowe’s Cos. Inc. (No. 25)
- Macy’s Inc. (No. 6)
- Target (No. 20)
- TJ Maxx (part of TJX Cos. Inc., No. 127)
- Walmart (No. 3)
The consumers had to complete a series of online shopping tasks, rate their experience and then UserTesting weighed the results and generated a score.
Best Buy scored a 90.3 out of 100, Home Depot 89.5 and Target an 89.0. In fact, all the retailers had a fairly high composite score, but category scores varied. For example, the majority of the retailers had a very high credibility score, as these retailers are well known and have established trust with consumers, UserTeseting says.
Not many retailers, however, succeeded in “delighting” customers, which admittedly is difficult, says Brian Smith, UserTesting’s vice president of marketing.
“Consistently delighting customers requires both a thorough understanding of [shoppers’] needs and motivations and constant innovation,” Smith says. “Delight includes exceeding customers’ expectations as well as making the shopping experience a pleasurable and memorable one.”
Ease of use—defined as a customer’s ability to find the product or information she wants and complete her task without difficulty—is the most critical factor in a customer’s likelihood to make a purchase, UserTesting says. The study asked shoppers to locate an item, review shipping information, find a store location, and rate the ease and difficulty of each task.
Best Buy ranked No. 1 among the retailers for finding a product and reviewing shipping information. Best Buy’s main menu lets shoppers quickly navigate to a product; the search bar is useful, as it suggests categories as shoppers type; and shoppers find it easy to sort product by price and view product ratings, the report finds.
Lowes.com, which ranked No. 1 for easiest to locate a store, generated negative feedback for requiring shoppers to enter a ZIP code before they can see an item’s price.
“Many shoppers found that this slowed them down, and this negative experience affected not only the site’s ease of use score, but also its speed and delight ratings,” Smith says. “By contrast, Lowe’s bested all websites in the locate a store task, betting bigger on its omnichannel strategy.” Lowes.com won the 2017 Internet Retailer Excellence Award for best website redesign.
Reviewing shipping information was the hardest task for shoppers to complete in the ease of use category on every website except Costco, where finding a product was the most difficult task.
Shoppers frequently complained that shipping information was difficult to find for the retailers, unavailable until after payment information was provided or vague. For example, Macy’s only told a shopper when his product would leave a warehouse and not when it would arrive, according to the report. Lowe’s, Macy’s and Walmart scored the lowest in the review shipping category with scores under 40.
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