Site consistency remains constant in July

Web site consistency was about the status quo among big web retailers in July with 17 merchants achieving a consistency rating of “excellent,” according to Gomez Inc.

Top 500 Guide

In July, 23 retailers received a rating of “good,” 8 got “fair” and none received “poor.”

The consistency ratings take into account differences in the speed of web page delivery across multiple visits and the frequency a retail site is unavailable because of downtime. The variability of response time and the number of minutes out are combined to create each retailer’s consistency rating, Gomez explains.

In July, the top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 98.02% and an overall consistency average of “good.”

Top 50 Web Site Performance Index: Consistency July 01 , 2007 - July 31 , 2007 Retailer Consistency Rating Consistency (seconds) Availability (%) Dell Excellent 10.12 98.77 Zappos Excellent 10.03 98.43 Footlocker Excellent 11.11 98.27 Office Max Excellent 11.57 99.49 Macys Store Excellent 10.85 98.28 Victoria Secret Excellent 12.84 97.72 QVC Excellent 15.22 98.10 J. C. Penney Excellent 11.17 98.52 The Home Depot Excellent 13.20 97.88 Musicians Friend Excellent 14.28 97.85 HSN Excellent 11.84 98.35 Avon Shopping Excellent 10.30 99.45 Quixtar Excellent 10.11 98.37 L. L. Bean Excellent 12.06 99.25 Scholastic Excellent 12.19 97.84 Saxs Fifth Avenue Excellent 12.23 98.32 Office Depot Excellent 10.90 99.27 Chadwicks. Good 13.03 98.21 Circuit City Home Good 13.95 97.83 Sony Style Good 17.84 96.13 Tiger Direct Good 16.04 95.84 Blue Nile. Good 11.49 99.21 Barnes and Noble Good 14.02 98.26 Staples Good 14.23 98.19 Drugstore Good 12.99 98.79 Nordstrom Good 12.09 98.79 1-800 Flowers Good 14.95 97.85 Benchmark Average Good 13.97 98.02 Sears Good 13.81 98.83 HP Shopping Good 14.67 97.77 Overstock Good 13.86 99.01 Buy.com Good 15.31 97.75 Wal-Mart Good 17.30 98.44 Newegg Good 15.00 98.17 Williams-Sonoma Good 13.81 98.07 Neiman Marcus Good 11.13 98.44 Netflix Good 13.66 98.98 FTD Good 15.05 98.44 Costco Good 15.72 99.02 PC Connection Good 11.48 98.73 Coldwater Creek Good 12.14 98.54 Amazon Fair 17.92 97.53 Peapod Fair 13.38 99.07 CDW Fair 14.71 98.33 Toys R Us Fair 17.01 96.48 Oriental Trading Fair 18.29 97.00 Target Fair 18.00 96.98 Gap Fair 19.24 95.38 Best Buy Fair 20.44 94.94 CompUSA Poor 15.57 98.74 Apple Store Poor 20.19 92.97 All data for this report is collected by the Gomez Last Mile network, 30 times an hour from Dial Up, Low and High Broadband users across the United States, 24 hours a day except between 3AM to 6AM EDT. Consistency Rating A qualitative representation of consistency ratings that are created with the lowest total score (Consistency + Availability) being normalized to 100. Above 98 = Excellent, above 95 = Good, above 85 = Fair, and below 85 = Poor. Consistency is the range between the high and low values of one standard deviation from response time. Availability is determined by the percentage of tests that fail to correctly load. Copyright© 2007 Gomez, Inc.