Study: Target website buggy, Amazon takes top honors

The test had the team clicking through each of the websites and ranking them on pricing, ease of use, product search capacity, reviews and ratings and product comparison tools. Amazon, uTest found, took the top spot in nearly every category, while Walmart's website won for product search capabilities and scored well on pricing. Target's website ranked lowest in all categories and is where most of the bugs were found (261, more than half of all reported).

According to Matt Johnston, vice president of marketing and community at uTest, said, "The bugs could be anything from the page didn't load properly, or a button was hidden behind an image, all the way to security issues." Cross-site scripting exposure was among the security flaws found on one of the retail websites, Johnston disclosed, refusing to name the company -- but the retailer was told of the risk.

Back in August, uTest conducted a similar exercise on search engines, with more than 1,100 testers from 50 countries testing Google (GOOG), Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing and Yahoo! (YHOO). Close to 90% of the testers reported that they favored Google above the others, but 10% reported that, after testing the three search engines, they would make Bing their default search engine, and 30% were pleasantly surprised by the new Microsoft tool. Bing had the most bugs, though it did score well in usability and design.