UK eCommerce sites losing sales with ‘invisible errors’

One third of the consumer online journeys tested by SciVisum experienced more than three per cent error rates, while more than ten per cent demonstrated extreme inconsistencies in delivery speed of the journey.

"This is a worrying trend for eCommerce and IT directors and for consumers with Christmas just around the corner.

Poor performance and web errors will mean lost sales," said Deri Jones, CEO, SciVisum. "Companies wanting to maximise their online sales this Christmas need to check the performance of their sites now. Those that fail to do so might as well include a link to their competitors’ site."

These are the key findings of the SciVisum Lost Online Sales Study, which investigated the performance of 40 online sites from the retail, finance, insurance and travel sectors, over a period of six months.

The study confirmed that customers of e-tailers are being exposed to a significant number and range of problems online which prevent them finishing their desired journeys, but are invisible to existing tools and web analytics.

Invisible errors

"Invisible errors are not outages affecting 100% of users, but are problems that impact a percentage of users at any point in time.

A problem that impacts say 1 in 100 random users on a particular journey is not reproducible by IT teams, and so frequently remains unresolved," said Jones.

SciVisum's testing adopts a mystery-shopper approach that actually visits the site and attempts to make a user journey every five minutes throughout the day.

This allows the company to see what customers see, and makes it possible to identify a range of intermittent problems that impact real users, but that are invisible to any other analysis.