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Originally published at Internet.com The need for business-technology alignment in retail industries is never more evident than during the holiday season. After all, what retailer - brick-and-mortar or virtual - doesn't want to ensure that its technology platforms are solidly supporting its web growth plans, especially when it comes to handling the make-or-break holiday shopping surge?
Consumers are expected to spend $32 billion online this holiday season, according to JupiterResearch, and estimates are that November and December account for anywhere from 30% to as much of 50% of all sales.
Yet there are still gaps between retail sites that excel in overall performance and availability, and those that aren't operating at maximum performance levels 24x7, according to statistics from Keynote Competitive Research, a division of mobile and Internet test and measurement company Keynote Systems.
The group is making available the aggregated results of its new Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices for three categories - apparel, books and music, and electronics - each Tuesday on its web site.
Keynote is now including outage hours as a metric in its transaction indices to measure site reliability success rate. An outage hour is defined as anytime there is an hour where 30% or more users (represented by agents) are not able to get to the site or complete a key task on it. After all these years of Internet shopping, early results show that there are still some major sites having large-scale outages.
"It always surprises me with retail," says Ben Rushlo, senior manager at Keynote Competitive Research. "Their goal is to generate revenue, unlike a banking site or a credit card site," where cost-savings through online self-service may be a bigger focus. With hundreds of millions of dollars in sales at stake, "you'd think you have sites that are always available."
But not so. Now add on top of availability concerns the finding that nearly half of consumers have frequent problems completing online purchases, and that a majority give up on a buy after one to three unsuccessful attempts to complete the purchase, according to a new survey conducted by Zoomerang. The survey was conducted on behalf of web application performance management vendor Gomez.
Rushlo speculates that outages are still occurring, at least in part, because companies aren't doing a good job measuring availability. "You can't just be concerned with what you can control from the data center," he says. "That's not capturing the customer experience." A new version of Keynote System's Transaction Perspective 7.0 service includes new troubleshooting features, including testing from a real browser, that are designed to quickly find and fix Web site performance problems.
Among the companies that took some outage hits for the week of October 23, according to Keynote: Overstock.com. The site registered No. 8 of 8 in the retail books and music category for reliability, with four outage hours, and No. 10 of 10 in reliability for the retail electronics category, with seven outage hours. (To be fair, response time in both categories was significantly better.)
Overstock.com wasn't alone in recording outages for that week, of course. And more recently, the site has been a far better performer. It recorded no outages for the week of November 20 - the week of Black Friday. In that same week Wal-Mart recorded six outage hours in the books and music category and seven in the retail electronics category. Amazon, Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City, Macy's, Eddie Bauer and Buy.com also wracked up their share of outage hours for that week.
Bully for Overstock.com, as it is liable to be in the spotlight this year following a holiday season last year that didn't live up to its own expectations. And this came on the heels of its widely reported IT problems that cost the company millions of dollars.
CEO Patrick Byrne in October last year admitted that the company's failure to execute on its IT projects, which included an ERP implementation, a database migration and the move of some applications to open source operating platforms, were to blame. The result: Weeks of delays in posting new products to the company's web site - at the same time that its buyers continued to make purchases and its warehouse partners continued to stock them. Eperts say true business-technology alignment requires both the business and technology groups to have not only an understanding of strategic goals but a realistic assessment of how prepared the technology organization is to deliver on them in a certain timeframe.
Overstock has said it believes the new tech infrastructure that's now in place has its business well positioned for the future. Byrne last year said he plans for this holiday season to be bigger than ever. That's an admirable goal for Overstock, and it's probably shared by the retail community at large. But it's going to require a keen focus on making online shopping a more reliable experience for consumers.
Best of luck, and happy holidays.
Author: Jennifer Zaino
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