Speed vs Reliability in e-Commerce Sites

Macy's, Borders, and HP have some of the fastest retail sites on the Web, but it's Saks Fifth that gets it right every time.

The Keynote Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices regularly publishes its findings on execution time and success rate in top 40 business sites and as well as top 40 government sites.

The index is based on hourly measurements conducted from 8 a.m. to midnight (EST), Monday to Friday. How long does it take to log in, search for an item, apply a filter, read product description, add to shopping cart, and proceed to checkout.

Keynote subscribers also receive reports on detailed and aggregated measurements on DNS lookup time, TCP connect round-trip time, etc. conducted round the clock seven days a week.

Among others, American Express and broker sites like Wells Fargo and Scottrade were added in 2006.

As far as developing your own e-commerce site goes, does it have to be a choice between speed and reliability?

Proving that you can have it both ways, Google is currently ranked first among the top 40 business sites, with a 100 per cent success rate and a response time of 0.47 seconds. Facebook doesn't do as well, with a success rate of 99 per cent and a response time of 0.52 seconds.

At the bottom of the pile are MSNBC with a response time of 8.02 seconds; and NY Times, which has a better response time of 2.56 seconds but has the lowest success rate of 89.7 per cent.

Keynote also conduct industry research, including a study of online groceries in the UK in 2008. Five grocery sites and 2000 respondents participated in the study, which focused on customer experience and service level rankings.

Ocado's e-commerce site was ranked first in terms of brand impact, with Sainsbury second. In turn, Sainsbury's site was ranked first in terms of customer satisfaction, with Ocado coming in second.

Keynote are offering its measuring and research capabilities as well to retail web sites in the US and UK. The studies would look into site performance in terms of brand-building, opinion and behavior, speed and reliability, best practices, and customer satisfaction.