E-commerce Sites Build Volume, Pass Critical Performance Tests

Both transaction volume and site performance overall gave online merchants reasons to smile in the weekend leading up to “Cyber Monday,” the day experts say is the busiest shopping day of the year online. Merchants appear to have souped up their servers to meet increasing traffic, as well as rising demand from online shoppers. Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based firm that tracks online performance, says there were no major response-time or uptime problems over the weekend at the sites operated by Costco, Office Depot, Amazon, JC Penney, and Wal-Mart?a departure from the past two years. The company attributes the improved performance in part to the merchants' improved ability to deal with a rising load of consumer queries regarding the availability of items. “One of the major changes in online shoppers' behavior this year has been to conduct real-time checks on the Web for an item's availability at their local stores,” said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote, in a statement. Keynote says uptime overall for the five major retail sites was close to normal throughout the critical weekend. The firm's reliability index fell as low as 96% during the time measured?Thursday morning until Sunday afternoon?but no single site went below 95% on more than a few occasions. Meanwhile, e-commerce transactions continued to build momentum. Visa USA reports online sales on its cards hit $2.26 billion for the week ending Nov. 27, or 10% of all Visa volume in the U.S. That volume represented a 30.3% jump from the same week a year ago, Visa reports. Online transactions for the week reached 29.1 million, up 25%. Visa says that although credit cards accounted for $1.2 billion of the volume, some $749 million came from debit cards, up 37.1% from the week a year ago. The week included Black Friday, traditionally thought to be the busiest shopping day of the year overall. Visa volume online for this day and the Saturday following hit $544 million ($297 million on Friday), a 32.1% increase from the same days last year, on 7.8 million transactions, a 26.6% increase. In recent years, statistics from the card networks have shown the Saturday before Christmas actually generates more volume than the Friday following Thanksgiving. “E-commerce continues to be a bright spot this holiday season,” said Visa USA economist Wayne Best in a statement. “And we expect e-commerce to experience further gains this upcoming week as more consumers turn to the speed and comparison shopping tools the Internet provides for their holiday purchases.”