Site performance stays consistent in October

Top 500 Guide

The largest web retailers delivered fairly consistent web site performance in October, says Gomez Inc. 13 retailers achieved a consistency rating of excellent in October, compared to 21 with “good,” 11 with “fair” and 6 with “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 October the top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 96.49%.

Top 50 Web Site Performance Index: Consistency October 01 , 2006 - October 31 , 2006 Retailer Consistency Rating Consistency (seconds) Availability (%) Office Max Excellent 15.33 99.03 Quixtar Excellent 17.25 98.48 Zappos Excellent 17.22 99.29 Scholastic Excellent 17.22 98.90 Footlocker Excellent 17.55 97.97 HP Shopping Excellent 17.87 98.35 Dell Excellent 18.09 97.98 Office Depot Excellent 18.64 98.96 Gateway Excellent 19.34 98.58 Peapod Excellent 21.94 97.48 Macys Store Excellent 20.26 98.66 Nordstrom Excellent 19.66 98.33 Neiman Marcus Excellent 20.59 98.11 Staples Good 20.33 98.35 CDW Good 21.06 97.70 J. C. Penney Good 20.81 98.82 Eddie Bauer Good 21.16 98.15 HSN Good 22.34 98.06 Cabelas Good 22.08 98.27 L. L. Bean Good 22.71 97.56 Circuit City Good 22.49 98.26 Drugstore Good 22.75 98.11 CompUSA Good 22.25 98.22 Wal-Mart Good 23.22 95.28 Barnes and Noble Good 22.71 98.23 Chadwicks Good 23.97 97.88 1-800 Flowers Good 22.93 97.76 Netflix Good 23.79 97.01 Benchmark Average Good 23.33 96.49 Victoria Secret Good 24.61 97.22 Avon Shopping Good 25.23 97.24 Williams-Sonoma Good 25.34 97.39 Sears Good 25.80 97.46 PC Connection Good 24.19 97.00 Musicians Friend Good 25.86 97.99 Costco Fair 26.15 96.42 Amazon Fair 26.58 97.16 Buy.com Fair 26.92 97.28 Overstock Fair 26.98 96.77 Apple Store Fair 27.02 97.24 FTD Fair 27.11 97.50 Newegg Fair 27.73 96.28 QVC Fair 27.99 96.57 Oriental Trading Fair 28.03 95.69 Best Buy Fair 29.27 93.30 The Home Depot Poor 28.90 94.21 Toys R Us Poor 22.64 83.76 Gap Poor 29.47 90.09 Sony Style Poor 24.09 84.50 Tiger Direct Poor 28.91 86.81 Target Poor 32.26 88.84 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.