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By silicon.com, 19 December 2003 16:15

silicon.com today revealed the performance of 10 top e-tail sites and found that even the biggest and the best names in the market have put in less than stellar performances in the run up to Christmas.

Empirix measured the performance of top retail sites such as Argos, Carphone Warehouse, Comet, Firebox.com, Sainsbury's, lastminute.com and several other big name players in the ecommerce world.

Starting on a positive note, the best site by far was Firebox.com who rewarded shoppers with the early Christmas present of 100 per cent uptime and average download times of 2.44 seconds.

Other speedy sites included Sainsbury's (1.68 seconds) and Argos (1.98 seconds). The slowest were Amazon.co.uk (7.75 seconds) and BOL (8.03 seconds).

Uptime was also a problem for all but three of the retailers monitored.

So what does this mean? Essentially the only people affected by poor performance are the companies themselves and their shareholders. Consumers aren't affected because they can make a decision about whether they want to come back or more likely whether they want to go elsewhere. But that is something e-tailers need to be acutely aware of.

After all, if the queues were too long in HMV you'd probably go and try the Virgin Megastores up the high street. The same is true online.

Scott Miller, VP European Operations at Empirix, said: "If customers don’t get to a home page quickly they become disillusioned and are likely to go elsewhere, never to return."

And with research from Boston Consulting Group claiming that 30 per cent of shoppers never return after one bad online experience the pressure is on sites to maintain peak performance year round.

One shopper told silicon.com: "Unless a site has something I particularly want, I will immediately go on to a rival site. There is nothing more frustrating than staring at a screen of endless error messages. It's not only a waste of time but spending half my day online doesn't go down too well with the boss."

All the sites tested are the best in their fields but that is why the onus is on them to perform. In the same way sites have a responsibility to ensure security and data protection, so they have a responsibility to ensure uptime and as good an experience as possible - as one bad e-tail experience can impact on all other sites.