Top retailers deliver mixed consistency

The largest web retailers delivered a mixed web site performance in November, says Gomez Inc. 11 retailers achieved a consistency rating of excellent in October, compared to 15 with “good,” 17 with “fair” and 8 with “poor.”

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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 November the top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 96.71%.

Web retailers and industry analysts are keeping a close eye on web performance in November and December in the wake of record holiday traffic. Already a number of major sites, including Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Overstock.com and Macys.com, have incurred slowdowns and some outages.

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Top 50 Web Site Performance Index: Consistency November 01 , 2006 - November 30 , 2006 Retailer Consistency Rating Consistency (seconds) Availability (%) Office Max Excellent 15.45 98.85 Quixtar Excellent 16.64 98.84 Zappos Excellent 16.22 99.43 Dell Excellent 16.47 98.62 Scholastic Excellent 18.94 98.81 J. C. Penney Excellent 19.04 98.91 Sears Excellent 19.62 98.52 Peapod Excellent 20.89 97.79 HP Shopping Excellent 19.01 98.21 Staples Excellent 19.32 98.55 Gateway Excellent 19.57 98.75 L. L. Bean Good 20.24 98.68 Office Depot Good 20.23 98.80 Macys Store Good 20.16 98.59 CDW Good 20.49 98.37 Neiman Marcus Good 19.81 98.73 Footlocker Good 20.59 98.18 Nordstrom Good 21.30 98.33 HSN Good 21.40 98.02 Eddie Bauer Good 21.36 98.28 Cabelas Good 21.79 98.54 Drugstore Good 22.30 98.28 Barnes and Noble Good 22.05 98.75 1-800 Flowers Good 22.19 97.96 Avon Shopping Good 22.80 97.47 Netflix Good 23.01 97.53 CompUSA Fair 22.68 97.92 Benchmark Average Fair 23.24 96.71 PC Connection Fair 23.20 97.13 Overstock Fair 24.89 97.32 Williams-Sonoma Fair 24.64 97.94 Costco Fair 24.50 96.57 Victoria Secret Fair 25.12 97.55 Circuit City Fair 25.04 97.66 Newegg Fair 25.31 96.99 Buy.com Fair 26.33 97.39 Chadwicks Fair 26.30 97.37 FTD Fair 26.01 97.70 Musicians Friend Fair 27.13 96.94 Apple Store Fair 26.92 97.08 QVC Fair 27.63 96.45 Sony Style Fair 20.00 83.62 Amazon Fair 27.61 96.33 Oriental Trading Poor 28.59 95.53 The Home Depot Poor 28.66 94.60 Toys R Us Poor 29.54 93.59 Tiger Direct Poor 30.27 91.15 Gap Poor 28.81 88.24 Wal-Mart Poor 30.33 92.23 Best Buy Poor 31.85 90.58 Target Poor 29.66 87.98 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© 2006 Gomez, Inc.

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