Blockbuster Delivers Top Website Performance on Cyber Monday, Winning Gomez's 'Merchant Madness' Tournament

LEXINGTON, Mass., Nov. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockbuster outlasted 63 of the largest online retailers (1) in the finals of Gomez's four-week "Merchant Madness" tournament (2), a battle for retail website performance supremacy over the holiday shopping season. Blockbuster's website withstood five rounds of competition and performed better than finalist Overstock in yesterday's final Cyber Monday round, the busiest online shopping day of the year when more than 70 million people shopped online. During the contest, Blockbuster's website outperformed head-to-head opponents including CDW, Best Buy, HP, Dell and Zappos. Overstock beat IAC, ShopNBC, Nordstrom, J.C. Penney and REI.

Since the end of October, Gomez's "Merchant Madness" has measured the availability, response time and consistency of 64 retailers' websites in a bracket-based tournament. The contest was designed to shine a spotlight on the critical issue of website performance and how fragile it can be when put to the ultimate test -- during the critical holiday season.

"Overstock and Blockbuster, while very different business models, got this far in the tournament as they evidently put their customers' experience at the very center of their website strategy, from site design through to reliable delivery at the end-user's desktop. We congratulate them both," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance strategies. "While we can assume that Blockbuster may have experienced less of a bump in Cyber Monday website traffic than Overstock, Blockbuster still delivered incrementally better overall performance and therefore is crowned the 'Merchant Madness' winner."

"Merchant Madness" supplements Gomez's Retail Benchmark, a 24/7 measurement of the website speed and availability of the top 50 online retailers. Gomez also produces website performance benchmarks for the travel, finance and media industries, found at: http://benchmarks.gomez.com./

About Gomez

Gomez is the leading provider of on-demand web application experience management solutions, helping the world's top businesses ensure quality web experiences for their customers. Gomez(R) ExperienceFirst(TM) applications are used by more than 1000 companies worldwide, including eight of the top 10 most visited sites, six of the top 10 retailers, nine of the top 10 financial services firms, five of the top 10 social networking companies, and four of the top 10 industrial companies. Founded in 1997, Gomez provides the industry's only complete solution for managing the web application experience from development through deployment and the entire application life cycle, featuring active monitoring, competitive benchmarking, and more than 25,000 data sources worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.gomez.com.

The results of Gomez's "Merchant Madness" tournament are the property of Gomez, Inc. and may not be distributed, retransmitted or used for any commercial purpose, in whole or in part, without express written permission from Gomez.

Gomez(R) and Gomez.com(R) are registered service marks, and ExperienceFirst tm is a service mark, of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

(1) Gomez's "Merchant Madness" measures the web performance of the top 64 retailers (by revenue) from Internet Retailer Magazine's Top 500, split into apparel, electronics, mass merchant and specialty categories.

(2) "Merchant Madness" scoring and methodology can be found at: http://www.merchant-madness.com/methodology.php

Available Topic Expert(s): For information on the listed expert(s), click appropriate link. Matt Poepsel http://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=69339