Site consistency remains unchanged in September

Web site consistency stayed essentially the same among big web retailers in September with 19 merchants achieving a consistency rating of “excellent,” according to Gomez Inc.

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In September, 19 retailers received a rating of “good,” nine got “fair” and three 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 September, the top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 98.6% and an overall consistency average of “good.”

Top 50 Web Site Performance Index: Consistency September 01 , 2007 - September 30 , 2007 Retailer Consistency Rating Consistency (seconds) Availability (%) Dell Excellent 9.63 98.72 Zappos Excellent 10.20 99.61 Footlocker Excellent 10.87 99.31 OfficeMax Excellent 11.34 99.45 Victorias Secret Excellent 12.29 99.19 Macys Store Excellent 10.84 99.45 Scholastic Excellent 11.83 97.56 Saks Fifth Avenue Excellent 10.32 99.66 J. C. Penney Excellent 11.00 99.34 Coldwater Creek Excellent 9.89 99.47 L. L. Bean Excellent 11.21 99.10 Quixtar Excellent 9.63 99.28 Chadwicks Excellent 13.32 99.09 The Home Depot Excellent 12.87 98.95 FTD Excellent 12.22 99.15 Musicians Friend Excellent 14.48 99.09 Office Depot Excellent 10.36 99.27 Avon Shopping Excellent 10.27 99.36 Circuit City Home Excellent 14.59 98.84 QVC Good 16.35 93.47 1-800 Flowers Good 13.23 99.02 Nordstrom Good 11.90 99.20 Barnes & Noble Good 13.05 99.44 Sears Good 14.68 97.87 Sony Style Good 17.73 98.40 Drugstore Good 13.35 99.10 Overstock Good 12.20 99.18 Buy.com Good 15.15 98.97 Blue Nile Good 11.34 99.25 Benchmark Average Good 13.59 98.61 Williams-Sonoma Good 13.39 99.28 Staples Good 13.76 98.99 Amazon Good 14.62 98.84 HP Shopping Good 13.92 98.60 Netflix Good 12.59 99.05 Newegg Good 14.95 98.75 HSN Good 13.40 98.57 Wal-Mart Good 17.68 98.50 Tiger Direct Good 17.08 98.59 Target Fair 16.86 98.06 PC Connection Fair 10.68 98.36 Costco Fair 15.94 98.93 Peapod Fair 12.88 99.08 CDW Fair 14.20 99.14 Best Buy Fair 18.94 97.13 Toys R Us Fair 18.63 97.06 Neiman Marcus Fair 11.33 99.28 Oriental Trading Fair 18.49 97.76 Gap Poor 18.72 95.71 CompUSA Poor 15.07 99.10 Apple Store Poor 20.33 94.09 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.