Holiday web performance at 26 leading online retailers improved
Web performance at 26 leading online retailers improved overall during the holiday season, with the top seven performing sites having 99% availability, according to web site performance monitoring company Keynote Systems Inc.
Cabela’s Inc., Barnes & Noble.com Inc. and Best Buy Co. had the industry’s best reliability over the holiday season, indicating their sites were highly available, and experienced little or no downtime over the 30-day study period, Keynote says. Victoria’s Secret, Circuit City Stores Inc. and Cabela’s had the best site responsiveness as measured by how quickly pages loaded and how many consumer transactions were completed.
“From a web performance perspective, the biggest news out of the holiday season is the overall improvement in performance of sites across the retail industry as compared to last year,” says Ben Rushlo, senior consulting manager for Keynote’s competitive research group. “However, we still see a number of major retail brands with significant slowdowns and peak hour outages during this crucial season. That has a direct impact on online sales that can account for up to a third of overall holiday sales.”
Some of the leading retail sites showed up to 400% slowdowns during peak shopping days, a rate which leads to consumer abandonment of a product search or checkout, Keynote says. However, on average, retailers experienced 5% to 10% slowdowns, which would not significantly affect the consumer’s online experience or impede checkout.
Retailers on average had seven hours of complete downtime during the holiday, the equivalent of half of a day’s sales, according to Keynote. The worst performing sites, including some highly recognized retail brand names, experienced up to 20 hours of complete downtime. In comparison, the best performing sites experienced either no downtimes or downtimes of less than two hours.
The electronics, books and music retailers in general had the best technical quality performance while the home improvement industry showed the worst performance overall, Keynote says.
Retail web sites included in the study were Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Buy.com, Borders, Circuit City, Dell, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Overstock.com, Staples, Toys R Us, Target and Wal-Mart.
Keynote reported revenue of $17.7 million for the first quarter of its 2008 fiscal year ended Dec. 31, up 12% from $15.8 million a year earlier. Net loss for the 1Q2008 was $744,000, reflecting the company’s continued investment in sales and marketing.
As of Dec. 31, Keynote’s worldwide customer base totaled about 2,700 companies, up from 2,650 companies a year earlier. As of Dec. 31, Keynote measured 11,840 Internet pages, compared with 10,150 a year earlier.
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