Homewares retailers continue to perform well online, with a strong representation at the head of the table of the UK's top 500 retail websites, in Q1. By Glynn Davis

The sector has six merchants in the top 20 of the best performing online stores in the latest quarterly testing undertaken by specialist Sitemorse.

Pownall Carpets holds its position in second place with an impressive score of 7.86 out of 10 and Beds Direct climbed nine places to third spot with a score of 7.38. But they were unable to stop department store W Boyes & Co from moving up three places to take top slot this quarter with its score of 7.92.

Being able to track the sector movements represents a change in the way we are going to be able to analyse the quarterly rankings of the Retail 500. As a result, rather than simply reporting on the overall rankings (regardless of sector) each quarter, a monthly analysis will instead be published on The Retail Bulletin looking at specific trends and a focus on certain sectors.

This more in-depth look at the performance of the websites of the UK’s top retailers will throw much more insight into how the different sectors are performing against each other. In addition, it is now also possible to compare the performance of transactional websites against those without this capability.

The full detail is available at http://www.sitemorse.com/survey/report.html?rt=1098&key=ecd3b65a

As an example of how much more powerful this will be we can see in Q1 that retailers in the electricals sector performed poorly. The top placed BrightHouse manages to score only 4.20 out of 10 and the likes of Dixons and Carphone Warehouse score only 3.32 and 3.20 respectively.

This is rather surprising because online is a very powerful channel for electrical retailers. This must be seen as a missed opportunity for the players in this sector.

Also at; http://www.theretailbulletin.com/news/homewares_retailers_websites_perform_well_in_q1_03-02-15/