Online retailers slow to build faster sites
Online retailers are getting very good at building home and product pages that give customers a better shopping experience, but many web merchants still need to work at improving site performance, suggests a new study from Keynote Systems Inc.
For its study, Keynote examined the site performance and measured the customer shopping experience of about two dozen well-recognized web retailers. The study of site performance levels gave the highest service level rankings to Williams-Sonoma Inc., Walmart.com, Eddie Bauer, Staples Inc., Circuit City Stores Inc. and Best Buy. Co. In particular, the Keynote study, which compared retailers on 40 different service metrics such as their average T1 and dial-up response times, said that Williams-Sonoma provided the most consistent response times and that Walmart.com had an e-commerce platform capable of handling much heavier future traffic.
But without naming specific retailers or breaking out specific performance statistics, the Keynote study also suggests that many web retailers are still having problems and need to improve site performance. “The retail industry has succeeded in providing descriptive product web sites, but the transaction performance falls short of expectations,” says Chris Loosley, general manager, service level business for Keynote. “It was surprising to find that several of the sites had major load-related issues, a result of detailed page designs and did not easily facilitate the check-out process.”
In its performance study, Keynote said that Office Depot Inc. and Staples Inc. had the best average T1 line response, while Staples, Office Depot and Costco Wholesale Corp. had the best average dial-up response.
The study, which Keynote conducted between May 7 and June 3, found that many sites still reported “significant outage hours.” Keynote also reports that the checkout process “is the least reliable online shopping activity.”
“Our market intelligence demonstrates that the visual appeal of online retail web sites is equal in impact to price satisfaction for consumers considering an online purchase,” says Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. “The industry appears to be sacrificing speed and reliability to provide visually appealing web pages.”
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