Retailers are ready for the crunch, says Gómez’s first holiday index
Online apparel, computers & electronics and mass merchant retailers are ready for the onslaught of shoppers, says the Gómez Holiday E-Tail Performance Index. Gómez reports that most sites measured from Internet backbone and last-mile nodes demonstrated consistent performance in the first round of testing.
The company also reports that:
• computer/electronics retailers showed the fastest overall response times as measured across the last mile;
• mass merchants lagged other retailers in application performance measured across the last mile, with their heavy use of information graphics as a possible explanation;
• apparel retailers appeared to have completed their holiday preparation earlier than other categories as they posted the top transactional success rate average of 98%;
• application availability for all retailers suffered when serving dial-up customers. Availability on average slipped to 90%, five percentage points below the backbone average of 95%.
The fastest sites in the benchmark tests, and their home page response times, were: Nike, 0.3 second; Nordstrom, 0.8 second; Eddie Bauer. 0.8 second; Gap, 1 second; and Fredrick’s of Hollywood and Best Buy, both at 1.2 seconds. Laggards were Crutchfield an d J.C. Penney at 3 seconds; Blockbuster, 3.2 seconds; Target, 3.9 seconds; Circuit City, 5.3 seconds; and AOL Shopping, 6.1 seconds. The benchmark average was 2.2 seconds.
The Gómez Holiday E-Tail Performance Index benchmarks application performance of 25 of the top grossing online retailers in three categories: apparel, computer & electronics and mass merchants. The index measures application speed and success rate from 10 strategically located Internet backbone nodes; and users` PCs located throughout the US, connecting across the "last mile" at with dial-up, low broadband and high broadband.
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