Retail Sales Marred by Web Performance Issues, Reports Gomez, Inc.

Leading Brands Including Dell, Victoria’s Secret and Williams-Sonoma Websites All Impacted on Cyber Monday

Lexington, Massachusetts, December 1, 2008 — With the market and retailers nervous about sales and shoppers scouring the web for bargains, today is not the day for website outages or slowdowns. However, many of the largest brands have disappointed potential shoppers during the industry’s busiest shopping day. Dell, Victoria’s Secret and Williams-Sonoma’s websites all experienced issues during the morning of Cyber Monday causing them to lose sales opportunities and frustrate shoppers, according to Gomez, Inc., whose services test and monitor the performance of websites.

“Even the largest brands in retailing are not immune to web performance issues,” says Matt Poepsel, vice president at Gomez, Inc. “The issue is that retailers are trying every trick in the book to wring sales out of their websites, but when website complexity meets volume of shoppers, there’s just more opportunity for things to go wrong. The math is quite simple: website down, revenue lost, shoppers go elsewhere.”

Gomez measures the duration (response time) and success rate (availability) of a typical online shopping experience, from home page to product search to shopping cart and checkout. For the hours of 6am ET – 12 pm ET, Gomez’s tests of the Top 25 online retailers for Cyber Monday reported the following:

Victoria’s Secret home page is running well but shoppers trying to place items in the shopping cart receive a site unavailable page and are unable to proceed. The issue started at 10am ET and is still continuing.
Williams-Sonoma’s website experienced slowdowns at the shopping cart/view payment pages with a typical transaction slowing from 26 seconds at 6am ET to almost 50 seconds between 7 – 9am ET. The site returned to a steady 24 second response time at 10am ET.

Dell’s website returned an error to returning shoppers between 9.40am – 10.15am. Shoppers were unable to retrieve pre-populated account information, meaning they had to start-over filling out forms when checking out. The issue was quickly resolved.
Gomez’s tests of the Top 25 online retailers for Friday and Saturday reported the following:

Costco experienced an availability problem on Friday with about 64% availability for the period 6AM Eastern – Midnight. The problem began sometime after 3PM and lasted until 8PM. Comparative availability for Costco on Saturday was significantly improved at over 91%.

HP Shopping exhibited longer response times — nearly 45 seconds overall — on Friday, but by Saturday had returned to normal levels at about 13 seconds.

Overstock, a perennially strong performer at around 5-6 seconds, slowed to more than 17 seconds on average on Friday.

Sears suffered major availability problems, coming in at just over 61% availability for Friday, but turned in a 100% performance on Saturday.

Staples availability was somewhat off at 84% for Friday but had increased to 95% for Saturday.

Gomez, Inc. is ranked as the number one web performance monitoring solution provider to Internet Retailer Magazine’s Top 500 online retailers.

About Gomez

Gomez, Inc. is a leading provider of web application experience management services, which businesses use to test their web applications while in development and to monitor their web applications after deployment. More than 2,000 customers use Gomez’s on-demand services to improve the quality of the web experience in order to increase their revenue from web applications, reduce their operating costs, and extend their brand reputations. For more information, please visit www.gomez.com.

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Gomez and gomez.com are registered service marks of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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Retail Sales Marred by Web Performance Issues, Reports Gomez, Inc.

Leading Brands Including Dell, Victoria’s Secret and Williams-Sonoma Websites All Impacted on Cyber Monday