Posted on: Sunday, December 21, 2003
Online shopping not immune to holiday hordes
By Leslie Walker
Washington Post
Even cyberspace has holiday crowds.
So don't imagine you can still go online at this late hour and completely escape the need to venture into the demolition-derby parking lots and boa-constrictor checkout lines that plague local malls.
Some well-known retailers aren't doing so hot serving the millions of Internet shoppers browsing their Web sites, according to a firm that tracks Web site performance using software "agents" that mimic humans trying to shop.
Pages at the Internet's top 12 shopping sites took an average of 15.03 seconds to load during the week ending Dec. 8 — several seconds longer than before Thanksgiving, Keynote Systems reported last week. The company tests leading sites almost hourly in 10 different cities using broadband Internet connections.
OfficeMax.com was the worst performer that week, with a failure rate of 14 percent, meaning Keynote's software agent could not complete its assignment — log on, run a search, put a product in a shopping cart and check out — 14 percent of the time. Pages took an average of 29 seconds to load.
The week before, JCPenney.com was the laggard, with a failure rate of 18 percent.
JCPenney.com said its internal testing has seen no signs of significant site slowdowns.
Calls to OfficeMax were not returned.
Among the top performers were EddieBauer.com and Amazon.com, which have maintained failure rates below 2 percent in Keystone's tests.
All of which goes to show that Web merchants can have as much trouble as their offline counterparts in coping with the stampede of holiday procrastinators.
"Internet shoppers should expect to face similar types of problems they do going to traditional stores — longer lines, slower checkouts and more crowds," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst for Keynote.
With less than a week before Christmas, research nonetheless suggests that many folks are planning to order their gifts online, even though Internet shopping requires longer lead times because of shipping. One in four self-identified online shoppers had not even begun to do their electronic shopping by Dec. 5, according to a survey by Nielsen/NetRatings.
It remains to be seen how well Internet sales will do this year. Most forecasters are projecting holiday Web sales to jump 20 percent to 30 percent over last year, at least four times the sales growth predicted for traditional stores. But some surveys suggest Internet sales may do even better.
Online shoppers spent $8.5 billion in November, up 55 percent over the same period in 2002, according to a study released last week by Nielsen/NetRatings.
DVDs and videos were the hottest category, with $758 million in sales in November, up 133 percent over last year.
That's still slower growth than the enormous jumps Web retailers experienced in almost every category during the boom several years ago. As a result, today's growth is much more manageable for the typical Web merchant, said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, the online division of the National Retail Federation.
"Retailers are feeling very confident about their fulfillment capabilities this year," he said.
Keynote has established a track record at evaluating Web sites. More than 2,000 companies pay the San Mateo, Calif.-based firm to monitor the performance of their sites, including Microsoft Corp, American Express, Office Depot and United Parcel Service.
Another consultant who monitors Web sites also found performance at top retail sites wanting.
Andy King, president of Web Site Optimization, a firm specializing in Web design, analyzed 14 popular retail sites over the past week using a dial-up Internet connection.
He contends that a site's home page should fully load in less than 10 seconds over a dial-up line, and start displaying useful content — such as a search box — within two seconds. Yet King found the home pages of the 14 retailing sites took a full minute to load, on average. They took 21 seconds, on average, to display useful content.
"I think they are designing for broadband users, and not paying as much attention as they should to narrowband users," King said.
Some Internet merchants are stepping up their discounts, just as traditional retailers do at the last minute.
There are several places you can check online to see quickly which merchants will be accepting Internet orders as late as tomorrow or Tuesday. (Keep in mind that Hawai'i shipping times are longer.)
One is the shipping calculator at PriceGrabber.com, which lets you sort by date a list of merchants guaranteeing delivery by Christmas.
Procrastinators may consider Neiman Marcus, which this week launched a free shipping upgrade to woo last-minute shoppers. Customers pay only standard shipping on orders over $99, and the company pays the difference to assure pre-Christmas delivery. The offer ends tomorrow.
Circuit City, meanwhile, offers the latest online ordering for in-store pickup — good for orders placed until 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
There's always a gift certificate, the lazy person's way out. But your choices for Internet gift certificates are limited. It's mostly too late to place orders for plastic gift cards to be mailed to your recipient, so you're left with electronic versions.
But you'd better hurry.
All those other procrastinators just might cause a traffic jam at your favorite Web site any minute now.
