Methodology

The RTI’s retailer ranking analysis was supported by Empathy.co's Open Innovation team and the scoring was developed based on four trust components:

Privacy

This metric analyses the cookies and trackers that are used in the first load on a webpage (before interacting with the cookie banner) and gives a score based on whether they are using the correct cookies on this phase and not using trackers.

Security

The score of this trust component is calculated according to the number of breaches that a site might have had in the past. Depending on the recentness of the breach and whether it caused sensitive data to be leaked, the trust score is penalised.

Accessibility

This metric analyses the accessibility of the main page of a retailers website which takes into account contrast errors, alerts, features, and ARIAs (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

Shopper Perception (2023)

Respondents perceived trust towards the top 50 retailers based on consumer research from 2,000 UK consumers conducted in August 2023.