Retail Websites Withstand Shopping Onslaught Throughout 'Black Friday' Weekend 
 
WALTHAM, MASS., December 1, 2004 -- Despite frequent traffic and transactional spikes, the speed and availability of critical Internet applications at the industry's leading retailers remained extremely consistent throughout the "Black Friday" weekend, according to Gomez®, Inc., the Internet Performance Management Company.

Gómez is benchmarking the application performance of the 26 top-grossing online retailers throughout the holiday shopping season in three primary categories: apparel, computers & electronics and mass merchants. The resulting benchmarks, called the Gomez Holiday E-Tail Performance Index (www.etailindex.com), compare the application speed and success rate of leading retailers as measured from 10 strategically located Internet backbone nodes and from real-users' PCs throughout the US across the bandwidth constrained "last mile."

Gomez real-time benchmarking services help companies across all business segments develop a fundamental awareness of critical Internet application strengths and weaknesses so they can begin building continuous improvement plans that help mitigate operational risk, drive cost containment initiatives and enable service differentiation. Leading companies often use benchmarking to define appropriate objectives, analyze whether they are investing too much -- or too little -- in Internet infrastructure relative to these business objectives.

Findings from the latest Holiday E-Tail Performance Index covering November 22 through the morning of November 29 reveal:

Retail sites performed consistently throughout the Black Friday weekend; a handful of sites struggled to keep pace with the seasonal surge in online shopping, which pulled down response time benchmark averages across all categories.
Compared with the previous weekend, application response times as measured from the backbone registered a 5% decline; there was a 2% decline in application response times as measured from the last mile.

Application success rates on average were 2% lower than the weekend before Thanksgiving; there was no change in success rate as measured from the last mile.

Computers & Electronics sites demonstrated the fastest overall response time of all benchmarked retailers.

Apparel retailers' applications performed well during the initial steps of our benchmarking process (i.e., searching and examining products) but slowed down on subsequent steps.
"Given these findings, it would appear that retailers for the most part were well prepared for the shopping spike that accompanied the holiday weekend," noted David Flinn, Gomez's Director of Performance Excellence. "Retailers that treat Internet performance strategically, by deploying process discipline to maximize their investments in automated tools, will reap the best returns in the make or break holiday shopping season."
To learn more about Gómez and the Holiday E-Tail Performance Index, please visit www.gomez.com.

About Gomez

Gomez is the leading supplier of enterprise solutions that help companies achieve and maintain the peak performance of their mission-critical Internet applications. Using Gomez products and services, enterprises reach performance excellence and meet or surpass their business goals.

Founded in 1997, Gomez provides performance measurement, benchmarking and competitive insight to Global 1000 companies across all industry segments, including financial services, e-commerce, information technology and travel.

Gomez is Network Computing magazine's "Editor's Choice" for best Internet performance monitoring service.

Gomez, Gomez.com, Gomez Performance Network are trademarks and/or service marks of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

For more information contact Alan Alper, Director, Marketing Communications at Gomez, Inc.: (781) 768-2147; aalper@gomez.com.
 

Back to Portfolio News