Internet merchants struggle with traffic

Online retailers can forget about Black Friday--the day after Thanksgiving when holiday shoppers overrun conventional stores. For online merchants, the real trouble seems to be early December. So far in the holiday shopping season, a handful of the most popular online merchants have struggled to keep up with a stampede of traffic, according to a report released last week by Keynote Systems, which tracks Web site performance. The Web sites of four retailers in the Keynote E-Commerce Index--J. C. Penney, Sears, OfficeMax and Nordstrom--failed on numerous occasions when Keynote's automated system tried to complete purchases in the first week of December. Over all, the 12 Web sites that are in Keynote's index performed more slowly and failed more frequently that week than in the three days immediately after Thanksgiving.

"If your site loses even 1 percent of its holiday sales because of this," said Roopak Patel, a Keynote analyst, "that's a significant amount of dollars." Keynote's system also tracked the Web sites of Amazon.com, Best Buy, Costco, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, Office Depot, Target and Wal-Mart Stores. And according to Keynote's calculations, some sites are losing far more than 1 percent of potential sales to poor performance.

For example, the system failed to complete a six-step purchase on the Sears site 17 percent of the time, compared with a failure rate of 0.27 percent on EddieBauer.com and 0.81 percent on Amazon.com--the two best performers in Keynote's index. (Failures, in Keynote's judgment, occur when Web pages only download partly, or their download times for a transaction exceed an average of 12 seconds a page on a high-speed Internet line.)

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