Thursday, December 28, 2000

Holiday Shopping Websites Receive Mixed Reviews

In its report on holiday e-commerce Web site performance, Keynote, an Internet performance authority, announced today mixed reviews for the 2000 online holiday shopping season. Despite fair performance overall with many sites measured by Keynote delivering acceptable performance levels, there were still some individual site problems. In addition, transaction performance on major retail sites varied widely.

Keynote conducted its annual e-Shopping Holiday Report this year measuring the performance and availability of 30 top e-commerce Web sites starting the week of November 5, as well as the transaction performance of 12 sites on the new Keynote Retail Industry BenchmarkTM. FedEx.com, VictoriasSecret.com, Buy.com, Dell.com, LandsEnd.com and KBKids.com led in Web page download performance with measurements averaging under 2.0 seconds since November 12. Landsend.com, Jcrew.com, LLBean.com and Eddiebauer.com led in transaction performance with the best results during the four weeks measured. Thanksgiving week was the slowest week of the season for users to access e-commerce Web pages, with performance of several sites taking up to twice as long as the week before, including Bluelight.com, EddieBauer.com, Gap.com, Walmart.com, Gateway.com and Hallmark.com.

Overall performance improved steadily in subsequent weeks, despite performance declines at many sites, offset by significant improvements at others. Individual sites, notably Bluelight.com and Macys.com, experienced slow performance, with marked improvement finally the week of December 3 with performance under 8.0 seconds. Given the individual site problems and ups and downs even among those sites doing better, it appears that there continues to be plenty of room for improvement when it comes to delivering a top quality experience to online customers, according to the company.

Performance overall this year has been better than it was last year. Last year Keynote measured the page download performance and availability characteristics of 10 of the top e-commerce sites during the holidays. The week before Thanksgiving this year was 66.24% better than the corresponding week in 1999 (which was last year's worst online holiday shopping week); the week of Thanksgiving this year was 10.75% better than the corresponding week last year; the week after Thanksgiving this year was 23.94% better than 1999; and the first week of December this year was 21.32% better than last year.

In addition to site performance, Keynote is also measuring e-commerce transaction performance, in this case the time it takes for online users to search for an item of apparel, on the 12 major retail sites comprising the new Keynote Retail Industry Benchmark, that sets a standard for transaction performance in this industry, and is the first time a set of comparative results exist for retail transactions online. The slowest week for transaction performance was the week of December 3, with an average 15.50 seconds to complete the transaction. Transaction results since Keynote starting measuring them the week of November 12 ranged from 4.13 seconds for Landsend.com to 28.54 seconds for the worst-performing site.

According to the study, the average "performance" of the sites in seconds was 3.11 with FedEx.com having the best stats at 0.86 seconds and Macys.com having the worst at 7.80 seconds. As far as availability of the sites surveyed, the average was 97.4% uptime. The most available site was LandsEnd.com with a 99.6% uptime and the worst was BlueLight.com with only a 71.6% uptime.

2000 Online Holiday Spending Peaks Over 1999 Levels
Online Holiday shopping peaked during the week of December 17th as overall spending nearly doubles 1999 levels, a new study from Goldman Sachs / PC Data disclosed today.

The latest figures (for the week ending Dec. 17th) show total online Holiday spending was $8.7 billion since the first week of November, a 108 percent increase over the $4.2 billion consumers spent on the web during the same period last year.

The latest weekly figures also show that online consumers continued to increase spending during the week ending December 17th to $1.6 billion, up slightly over the previous week’s $1.5 billion. This compares with $878 million during the comparable week in 1999.

“This week we saw a modest recovery in online Holiday sales after significantly lower than expected sales last week, as it appears that online sales have peaked for the 2000 Holiday season,” says Anthony Noto, Goldman Sachs Internet analyst.

“We’ve had a much longer online Holiday season this year than we did in 1999,” said Cameron Meierhoefer, Internet analyst. “In 1999 consumers bombarded online retailers in early December. This year volume surged in early November and maintained peak levels. Cautious consumers started shopping earlier to ensure that gifts were delivered on time, while more experienced retailers encouraged early shopping so they could better manage the load.”

The latest weekly numbers also demonstrate high satisfaction with online buying. Forty percent of respondents said their shopping experience was better than in 1999 and fifty-four percent said it was the same. Five percent said it was worse.

News Tidbits (appears every day on front page)
- Exactly how bad is the .com job market right now? According to Challenger Gray and Christmas, .com job cuts have consistently risen higher every month since June 2000. In June there were just under 2,000 jobs lost in the .com marketplace. That number has progressed higher through December in which there were over 10,000 jobs lost.