An Outage Outrage Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

Online holiday sales were up, but you can't say the same of all the leading retail sites over the period from Black Friday to Christmas Eve.

Only two of the 29 leading retail sites tracked by Keynote Competitive Research, a division of mobile and Internet test and measurement company Keynote Systems, can claim they made it through the holiday season without a single hour of outage.

The company's Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices include outage hours as a metric in the measurement of site reliability success rate for three retail categories - apparel, books and music, and electronics.

Those two sites were Target and Barnes & Noble.

"They stand out from their peers, but what's phenomenal is that all these other sites had at least an hour if not more-some as many as 20 - when major portions of their site (purchase paths or whatever it might be) were unusable," says Ben Rushlo, senior manager at Keynote Competitive Research. "That's surprising given that there's so much focus on the online channel now, there's so much revenue to be lost and gained online. It did surprise us that only two could pull off a flawless period."

What's the secret to their success? Infrastructure and internal processes certainly play a big part, Rushlo says. He also notes that companies such as Barnes & Noble, which is a Keynote customer, add to their success by being very pro-active in doing load testing, stress testing and measuring site performance.

"Internally they are very obsessed with this sort of data and use it at a high level in the organization, he says. "That's got to help."

Some online retailers made business decisions to ramp up traffic with special marketing promotions, even knowing that that may impair the ability of consumers to complete transactions for short periods. Amazon did some flash traffic based on having the Xbox 360 for a very low price, knowing the site was going to be hammered for certain periods but otherwise OK, Rushlo says. And while it had some issues, Amazon overall performed well on Keynote's ratings.

Probably 80% of users knew to expect disruptions during these periods because they were coming to buy Xboxes, but the risk is alienating the customers who may just have happened to come to the site during that period for other buys.

"It's a gamble," says Rushlo - though probably less so for an established brand leader like an Amazon or a Wal-Mart.

Keynote just issued its 2006 Trends & Observations in a Mobile and Connected World Report, and one of the conclusions reached there is that consumers are becoming more inclined to stick with their preferred brand than switch to a competitor's site.

The report draws from dozens of competitive research studies Keynote did in 2006, examining online industries from retail to search markets, as well as mobile and VoIP industries.

Some sites had issues on a daily basis over the holidays - if they didn't actually go down, their performance slowed significantly. During the holidays - or any other time of year - it's no longer acceptable to blame the Internet for performance issues.

In its 2006 Trends Observations Report, Keynote writes that 2006 marked the first time that the Internet reached service and reliability levels comparable to utilities.

The best sites were consistently able to deliver almost perfect performance, Rushlo notes: "If the best sites can go almost error free, without a single blip for a month, that means the underlying mechanism is working well," he says. "You can't as a CIO blame the Internet for the ills of your site anymore."

He says that 99.9% of issues Keynote sees on sites these days are related to issues businesses can control, from their infrastructure to their network to their servers, applications, and the way they design content.

Online business continues to grow each year, with every holiday season raising the bar a little higher-it's up 26% over last year, according to ComScore Networks. Companies are lucky in that consumers are proving a hardy bunch, pushing through errors and issues to complete their transactions, but Rushlo thinks they should be focusing on the lost opportunities.

"If you had record sales but ten hours of outages, you could pat yourself on the back. But the question for the CEO or CFO should be, could we have done even more? Instead of growing 30% could we have grown 40%?," he says. "Could we have capitalized even further on the trend if we had been one of the top sites?"