April Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

The comprehensive list of 100 sites, which includes not only the largest players but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created by The Retail Bulletin and specialist website testing company Sitemorse that used its automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer's site to generate a ranked table.

Bottom of the pile was the Dixons site with a score of only 0.22 out of 10, which was just beaten by Currys with 0.94 and PC World with 1.00. This exceptionally weak performance highlights the serious task facing the DSG chief executive John Browett who is due to deliver a strategic review of the company on May 15.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, says: "The online-only site Dixons.co.uk has been bottom for so long that I wonder what the City thinks about this and whether it makes them want to invest in such a company. I could understand if one of its sites was not good but to have all three at the bottom is quite an achievement."

He suggests that online-only retailers should be ranked within the top 20 in the list – with scores of at least seven out of 10. It is a surprise therefore to find big-hitters ebay languishing at 82nd spot with a score of only 1.98 and Amazon faring even worse in 91st place with a mere 1.52 out of 10.

Shaw says a big problem for Amazon is the failure of some of the links between pages due to the extremely large size of its site. Links are also a problem for ebay along with the failure of a lot of photographs to download. However, he points to the Tesco Direct website as also being large but which achieves a credible score of 7.50 that places it in third place in the table.

"The argument is that everybody buys from Amazon and ebay so what is the problem? These days we're only at the start of the internet revolution so while in-store retailers looks to increase footfall by 0.5 per cent online is still growing so fast that many of the issues and problems with their websites are simply left. But we believe that the sooner they sort out their problems then the sooner they'll be better placed for the future," suggests Shaw.

Another issue with Amazon is its poor record on accessibility to its site by visually impaired people as 100 per cent of its pages fail the basic Sitemorse accessibility testing. "They are simply paying lip service to things that people are getting sued over in the US. And we believe it is not that difficult to achieve the requirements of our testing," says Shaw.

On a positive note pure play gadget seller Firebox has performed particularly strongly of late climbing to eighth spot with a score of 6.70 which compares with the 5.10 that it achieved two months ago. "It looks a well managed site, with most things there. It's not got hugely complex pages so there is just the odd error but it is a well featured site," says Shaw.

Also performing well is sofa seller DFS that has moved up one place to take the top spot with a score of 8.74, which Shaw says is a major achievement as it is the first retailer to break the eight out-of-10 barrier. "It loads very quickly and is well thought out. And sensibly, the page titles for the search engines all match up with the company's marketing campaigns."

However, returning to the bottom end of the table - for yet another month it has not been possible to score and rank the sites of Gap, Boots and Co-op. They continue to be excluded from the table as a result of them either being ‘down' at the time of testing or because of their reliance on ‘assistive' technology, which SiteMorse believes breaks the general "rules of accessibility" of internet sites.