Despite some performance slowdowns, top retailers remain consistent

Despite the fact that some major retailers couldn’t always handle the record volume of traffic generated by online holiday shoppers, site response times among big merchants in December were still very consistent, says Gomez Inc.

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Overall, web shoppers could access a top 50 retail site with a high broadband connection an average of 98.96% of the time, compared with an average of 98.25% for a low broadband connection and 85.97% for dial-up.

In late November and in early December, Amazon.com, Walmart.com and Overstock.com were among the online retail web sites that incurred slowdowns and downtime. But for December Amazon achieved a high broadband site success rate of 99.28%, while Walmart.com and Overstock.com recorded averages of 98.97% and 99.05%, respectively, according to Gomez.

The retailers delivering the best site success rate in December included Zappos.com at 99.58% and Scholastic.com and BarnesandNoble.com with averages of 99.50% and 99.47%, respectively.

Top 50 Performance Index: Site Success Rate  December 1, 2006 - December 31, 2006 Availability (%) Site Dial Up (%)   Low Broadband (%) High Broadband (%) Zappos 98.00 99.62 99.58 Office Max 97.82 99.05 99.30 Dell 97.60 98.53 99.06 Quixtar 96.94 98.96 99.04 J. C. Penney 96.80 99.20 99.30 Office Depot 96.68 99.32 99.32 Sears 96.01 98.65 99.10 Eddie Bauer 95.97 98.90 99.01 Avon Shopping 95.72 98.94 99.32 Neiman Marcus 95.69 99.01 99.36 Cabelas 95.38 99.33 99.09 Gateway 95.20 98.84 99.25 Macys Store 95.18 98.71 98.97 Nordstrom 95.11 98.82 99.25 Staples 94.97 98.85 99.10 HSN 94.91 98.99 98.83 Barnes and Noble 94.56 99.09 99.47 HP Shopping 94.51 98.49 98.75 Peapod 94.42 98.34 98.90 Footlocker 94.32 99.15 99.45 Scholastic 94.07 99.17 99.50 CDW 94.00 98.82 99.00 Drugstore 93.66 98.71 99.17 CompUSA 93.27 98.81 99.24 L. L. Bean 93.17 98.92 99.34 Victoria Secret 92.51 98.70 99.15 Williams-Sonoma 91.41 98.99 99.16 Costco 91.28 98.93 99.45 1-800 Flowers 90.81 98.47 99.03 Overstock 90.33 98.44 99.05 PC Connection 89.87 98.18 98.71 Netflix 89.74 98.76 99.07 FTD 89.31 98.82 99.19 Circuit City 89.05 98.51 98.98 Newegg 88.86 98.41 98.81 QVC 86.61 99.09 99.11 Apple Store 86.36 98.80 99.32 Benchmark Average 85.97 98.25 98.76 Buy.com 81.30 98.12 98.93 Amazon 79.97 98.74 99.28 Chadwicks 76.55 98.61 99.07 The Home Depot 74.97 97.43 98.11 Oriental Trading 74.46 97.85 98.57 Tiger Direct 73.22 98.58 99.07 Musicians Friend 69.53 98.60 99.15 Toys R Us 64.31 98.51 99.35 Wal-Mart 62.77 98.09 98.97 Best Buy 58.64 95.73 97.98 Target 55.76 97.90 98.94 Gap 55.27 97.04 98.33 Sony Style 11.42 80.19 83.72 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. Availability is determined by the percentage of tests that fail to correctly load. Copyright© 2007                                                  Gomez, Inc.