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Irritations vary. “The biggest frustration online is lack of contactability,” says Yvonne Parsons, 41, who used to work in customer service. “Sites might have an e-mail address, but you send a note and nobody bothers to get back to you, or they don’t contact you for three days. I expect a reply the same day.”

So do two-thirds of online shoppers, but it’s not happening. “The number of e-mails sites receive is increasing exponentially,” Russell says, and some now hide their e-mail address. Amazon has always made its phone number hard to find, and in Doors reviews, we mark down any site that makes itself hard to contact. “Ideally, you should never have to e-mail a site,” Russell continues. “It should answer all the obvious questions, as EasyJet tries to do.” EasyJet’s Contact Us section first takes you to 134 frequently asked questions, on 14 searchable pages.

There are other frustrations. Daniella Soar, 32, has been shopping online for eight years. “It’s the easiest way to find what you want, especially when it is such a horror going round the London shops.” She considers it unreasonable to be asked to register her personal details merely in order to browse. So does Deri Jones, head of SciVisum, which offers web- testing services to sites. “At Tesco’s site, you have to register just to look around. That puts obstacles in the way of impulse purchases, when you should be making shopping as easy as possible.”

Tesco also fails the crucial test of offering a decent search tool. It still can’t even find a basic synonym such as “loo paper”. “Someone has bolted on a fuzzy matching program that is worse than nothing,” Jones says. “If you use Google 20 times a day, that’s the paradigm you come to expect. We are much more impatient now, and there is nothing worse than knowing a product is somewhere on a site, but not being able to find it.”

Another fundamental mistake is for sites to fail to mention that they don’t have the same range online as in the store. “That has become an increasingly common frustration,” Russell says. “Consumers blame the site.”

Other wrinkles abound. A surprising number of products are unavailable on the web — for all their dazzle, the websites of Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen don’t sell online, and BookZone has such an eccentric approach to retail that its home page doesn’t show any products at all. At the stationer Staples, the Add to Basket icon looks almost identical to Add to List (whatever that is). Pro-Direct Tennis empties the entire contents of your basket if you don’t check out quickly enough. Even the mighty Amazon persists in not telling you how much delivery will cost until the last moment; and from the checkout page, you can’t use the back button, the most popular key on the keyboard.

“Personally, I don’t think Amazon is a very good site any more,” Russell says, “but it does deliver, and quickly.”

Now that it is rare for sites to fail to load — down from 9% in 2000 to less than 0.1% today — the overall impression is what counts. Russell says: “Consumers measure an organisation by the end- to-end experience, including e-mail, delivery options and efficiency. The website does not stand alone.” This is a lesson online shops need to absorb fast.

Send your online shopping experiences to doorscampaign@sunday-times.co.uk

10 golden rules: what online customers want

1 Provide clear information on contacts, delivery and refund policy — Yvonne Parsons, online shopper

2 Think “user journey” rather than individual pages: how are visitors going to work through the shopping experience, from end to end? — Deri Jones, SciVisum

3 Let shoppers browse without having to register — Daniella Soar, online shopper

4 Keep sites simple and easy to use — Daniella Soar

5 Offer an effective search engine — Deri Jones

6 Market your site online and link to search engines — Chris Russell, eDigital Research

7 Provide consistency of experience — Deri Jones

8 Say so if you’re a bricks-and-mortar shop, and the whole catalogue is not offered online — Chris Russell

9 Think through customer service and give complaints ID numbers so that they can be tracked — Yvonne Parsons

10 Build trust with customers — Chris Russell

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