Site consistency slightly better in August

Web site consistency rose slightly among big web retailers in August with 19 merchants achieving a consistency rating of “excellent,” according to Gomez Inc.

Top 500 Guide

In August, 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 August, the top 50 retail web sites had an average site availability rate of 98.7% and an overall consistency average of “good.”

Top 50 Web Site Performance Index: Consistency August 01 , 2007 - August 31 , 2007 Retailer Consistency Rating Consistency (seconds) Availability (%) Dell Excellent 8.81 99.06 Target Excellent 11.57 99.16 Zappos Excellent 10.12 99.66 Office Max Excellent 11.41 99.32 Footlocker Excellent 11.25 99.23 Macys Store Excellent 11.76 99.49 Victoria Secret Excellent 12.82 99.40 J. C. Penney Excellent 11.47 99.24 Coldwater Creek Excellent 10.78 99.59 Chadwicks. Excellent 13.17 99.37 L. L. Bean Excellent 12.67 99.15 The Home Depot Excellent 12.71 99.20 Quixtar Excellent 10.76 99.29 Musicians Friend Excellent 14.39 99.14 QVC Excellent 16.39 94.54 Scholastic Excellent 12.48 97.73 Office Depot Excellent 11.72 99.45 FTD Excellent 13.16 99.19 Barnes and Noble Excellent 14.15 99.26 Sony Style Good 17.78 98.04 Avon Shopping Good 16.25 98.98 Drugstore Good 13.67 99.26 Circuit City Home Good 15.21 98.76 Overstock Good 12.51 99.27 1-800 Flowers Good 13.57 99.01 Newegg Good 15.64 98.79 Nordstrom Good 13.01 99.40 Sears Good 13.86 97.82 Blue Nile. Good 11.93 99.31 Buy.com Good 15.57 98.98 Benchmark Average Good 14.13 98.70 Williams-Sonoma Good 13.96 99.23 Staples Good 14.20 99.07 Saxs Fifth Avenue Good 14.95 99.15 Netflix Good 12.85 98.86 Tiger Direct Good 16.35 98.78 HP Shopping Good 14.72 98.71 Wal-Mart Good 16.56 98.60 Amazon Good 17.63 98.71 Costco Fair 15.55 99.24 HSN Fair 14.98 98.58 PC Connection Fair 11.40 99.25 Peapod Fair 13.25 99.10 Neiman Marcus Fair 11.82 99.35 Toys R Us Fair 17.16 96.81 CDW Fair 15.61 99.18 Best Buy Fair 19.21 97.30 Oriental Trading Fair 18.38 97.42 Gap Poor 19.65 95.93 Apple Store Poor 20.73 94.58 CompUSA Poor 16.95 98.84 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© 2007 Gomez, Inc.