Record Online Spending Brings Record Strains

The record transaction volume recorded online this holiday shopping season also put record strains on Web sites' ability to handle the load. According to data from Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based site-performance management company, both response time and success rate for Web transactions improved in the week ending Dec. 29, but probably because by this time more shoppers were buying offline than online. Keynote, which has been tracking online transaction performance at 11 high-traffic sites since August, says the average time to complete a transaction in the latest week was 13.86 seconds, compared to 14.77 seconds the week ending December 22. The success rate, or the percentage of time a payment could be consummated, was 97.33%, an improvement of nearly 2.5 percentage points from the previous week. The best-performing of the sites was Eddie Bauer's, with a success rate of 99.73%. Best Buy recorded the worst, at 93.43%. But both response times and success rates were measurably worse during the week ending Dec. 15, when online spending hit a record $2.11 billion, a 28% jump over the same week in 2002 according to comScore Networks. Keynote Systems' index for this week showed online transactions requiring an average 15.03 seconds to complete, with payment succeeding an average 96% of the time. With comScore's statistics showing a 20% increase in online payment volume (not counting auction and travel spending) last year through October, to nearly $40 billion, it appears transactional capabilities online will have to gear up quickly to handle rapidly increasing volumes year-round, and particularly during the peak holiday season.