Christmas Catalogues vs Online Wish Lists

Last weekend, whilst having a quiet moment to myself, I started to try to organise my Christmas Shopping list. Like most people this year I HAVE to stick to my budget. The top retailers have launched their Christmas or seasonal catalogues, which I ruefully collect every year.

However, now online shopping baskets and wish lists are getting better, with intuitive internal searches. I decided to try to use their websites as on-line dynamic catalogues. Last year when I tried it, I was left feeling frustrated at the slow responding sites and poor search results.

I had a look at what I call the top three sites; sites where I get the vast majority of my Christmas presents from – Boots.com, Tesco.com and Argos.co.uk. Last year Tesco impressed me the most of the three, showing more experience in the e-commerce market than the other two. Overall, I wasn’t surprised.

Boots.com, however I was massively disappointed at. The site was dated, hard to navigate and did not inspire me to part with my cash online.

This year I have seen huge improvement in all three websites. Usability of these sites seems to have been at the top of the agenda. Tesco.com has improved its search results (last year they were bringing up very random and irrelevant results), they have also thought of the user and spilt up gift ideas by price, which for me was excellent to see and very welcome!

Argos.com have improved the website by speeding up the time taken to access categories, and the search results. The navigation bar has been improved (I have been seeing vast improvement on the Argos site since last Christmas), and the searches have improved using better and more relevant keywords.

However they are still to improve the site by correcting misspelling of words entered into the search bar. They have also added the quick shop, for those who know the catalogue numbers off by heart. The categories of products have also been spilt by price and by age, which is a huge bonus for me, trying to buy computer games for nephews and nieces.

Boots.com – The whole website has had a massive and long needed overhaul, bringing the site up to date and splitting down to categories on the home page. However, when I dug a little deeper, I felt that the overhaul was not as complete as I first thought.

The categories were not easy to separate into price (there goes my budget!) until deep into the category, deeply disappointing, as Boots has to be my favourite gift purchasing destination.

When using the add to favourites for my gift ideas, the whole website crashed and lots all the gift ideas I had painfully browsed the site for. I was impressed by huge development on the site but still tempted back to browse through the Christmas catalogue.

So I successfully managed to create shopping wish list on Argos and Tesco, but unfortunately Boots has some way to go to tempt me out of catalogue browsing!