Gomez Finds Web Transactions Held Up Well During the Holiday Crush

Response times and success rates for transactions on retailers' Web sites varied somewhat during the crush of the recent holiday shopping season, but for the most part transaction performance held up pretty well, according to a report released today by Gomez Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based company that measures Internet performance. The company's index, which measured performance on 20 apparel and mass-merchandiser sites, found that transaction success rates as measured from Internet backbone networks averaged 98% for the clothiers and 96% for the mass merchandise sites over the five-week period through Jan. 4. This rate of success in completing transactions was as good as or better than the performance of money-center banks and brokerage firms tracked by Gomez, the company said. “Web site performance during this year's online holiday shopping season served as a testament to the viability of the Internet as a highly reliable and growing sales channel,” John Lovett, a senior performance analyst at Gomez, said in a statement. The top performing sites in transaction success rate for the five-week period were those of Eddie Bauer, J. Crew, and Barnes & Noble, each of which maintained a 99.7% rate. As for response time, the study found the top three to be JC Penney, Macys, and Crutchfield, all of which posted blended response times under 22 seconds per transaction. The blend included a mix of dial-up and broadband connections. Transactions were measured from site access to shopping-cart creation through checkout. The Gomez report on retailers' Internet transaction performance during the holidays follows by days a similar study released by Keynote Systems Inc., San Mateo, Calif., which also tracks Web site performance (Digital Transactions News, Jan. 1). Keynote's study, which included 11 merchant sites, found more inconsistency in site performance than did Gomez's. Transaction success rates in Keynote's index, for example, swung from a low of 93.68% during the heaviest crush of pre-Christmas shopping to a high of 97.33% during the week that included Christmas. Keynote's results led the company to caution Web merchants to be better prepared for peak transaction loads. ComScore Networks, which measures Internet transaction volumes, estimates holiday-season traffic on the Web exceeded $12 billion (not including travel and auction spending), an increase of 30% from the same period in 2002.