Online grocery shopping, which allows customers to order their weekly food shop from their own home and have it sent to them by delivery services, is a growth market in the UK and engaged in by many traditional supermarkets as well as online-only retailers such as Ocado.
However, a recent study from digital behavioural analysis specialist Yuseo has found many customers find the web interface set up by retailers to allow customers to fill their virtual basket frustrating and difficult to use.
By asking more than 1,000 customers to browse the sites of various supermarkets and assess their efficiency and ease of use, it revealed many people are disappointed with the quality of the interface offered to them.
Overall the report returned a navigation experience score of 51 per cent and a user satisfaction rating of six out of ten, indicating many retailers have some way to go before they make their online shopping experience as popular as visiting a bricks-and-mortar store.
In terms of individual retailers, Asda performed well on the overall "logic" of the shopping experience but badly on providing optimal filters to help narrow the search, meaning tools such as a search bar.
Sainsbury's was praised for flagging up any problem with product availability but criticised for a clunky, unwieldy interface.
Andrew McClelland, chief operating officer of IMRG, said: "A retailer's go-to-market proposition may be very different from the competition but navigation glitches, poor site usability, bad imagery and deficient product descriptions will turn a customer off before they even start to worry about your delivery proposition."
Ocado, a former subsidiary of Waitrose which now delivers its own-brand products, is seen as representative of the boom in online grocery shopping which has occurred over the last few years.
It recently posted a 16 per cent rise in sales over the course of 2011, with the chief executive Tim Steiner positing that online grocery sales could become an £11 billion business by 2016.
Author: Paul Burn
