Wal-Mart, Sears Strain to Keep Pace With Holiday Online Shopping Onslaught

Gomez has released initial results from the companys 2003 Holiday E-Tail Performance Index of leading mass merchant and apparel e-commerce Web sites. The index is the industrys only set of Internet performance measurement benchmarks to capture and analyze site speed and reliability in real-time from Internet backbones and across the last mile. Among the key findings: - Despite a record Black Friday, Walmart.com performed appreciably slower over the holiday weekend compared with the pre-Thanksgiving period. In fact, Walmart.com ranked slowest of all 20 Web sites monitored with near 54-second aggregate last mile response times. - Apparel sites fared better than Mass Merchants in transactional response time and reliability with an average of 99% over the Black Friday weekend. Apparel sites success rate improved by 4.5 seconds from Gomezs pre-holiday measurement. - For many well-known Web sites, including The Gap, Circuit City and Best Buy, dial-up customers experienced frustration and delays in comparison with broadband users, who required 100 seconds and 15-20 seconds respectively to complete transactions.