Retail Website Performance Put to the Test in Gomez's 'Merchant Madness' Holiday Tournament

LEXINGTON, Mass., Nov. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Gomez, Inc. unveils "Merchant Madness," (www.merchant-madness.com) a tournament designed to crown the online retailer that delivers the best web experience over the frenzied November holiday shopping season. Will the household brands reign supreme? Or will an underdog take the title? Gomez's "Merchant Madness" tournament pits the performance of 64 online retailers' websites(1) using a brackets system and the Gomez global web performance measurement network to track which retailers are delivering the best -- and worst -- web experiences to the millions of consumers shopping online. Those with the fastest, most available and most consistent websites(2) will move onto the next round. The "Final Four" match-ups will take place on Black Friday (Friday, November 23) with the last two retailers meeting in the finale on Cyber Monday (Monday, November 26.) Gomez will crown the retailer that achieved the best web experience on Tuesday, November 27.

The first round of testing of the 64 retailers took place between October 29 and November 4 with surprising results in the mass merchant and specialty categories: Wal-Mart lost to Nordstrom; Target was beaten by Drugstore.com; Home Depot won over Toys R Us; and ShopNBC just inched out Amazon. To see the full results and the 32 retailers that move on to round two, visit www.merchant-madness.com.

"As online retailers compete, showering their customers with colorful promotions and price cuts, we will be able to see how well their websites perform under peak loads," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance strategies. "With over $39 billion on the table in potential online holiday sales -- an increase of twenty percent over last year(3) -- competition has never been hotter and consumer expectations higher. Now is not the time to risk losing sales because of poor website performance."

The "Merchant Madness" tournament 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 ExperienceFirst 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 www.gomez.com.

Gomez and Gomez.com are trademarks and/or service marks of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks 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" Methodology: -- Scoring During every testing period, each online retailer will be ranked (1 through 64) in the categories of availability, response time, and consistency. The winner of the head-to-head match-up will be the online retailer with the lowest cumulative ranking score. Total Score = Availability Rank + Response Time Rank + Consistency Rank In order to avoid a "forfeit" during the head-to-head match-up, retailers must maintain a minimum availability of 90% and an average response time under 10 seconds. -- Testing Periods (Rounds) Testing has been broken down into six rounds. The competition began October 29, 2007 and concludes with a winner on November 27, 2007. Dates for the round are below: Round of 64: 10/29 - 11/4 Round of 32: 11/5 - 11/11 Round of 16: 11/12 - 11/18 Round of 8: 11/19 - 11/22 Semi-Finals: 11/23 - 11/25 Finals: 11/26 -- Frequency and Location of Tests For the "Merchant Madness" tournament, Gomez tests the participants' homepages from ten geographically dispersed co-location facilities across multiple network providers within the United States. Testing will be performed at regular 60-minute intervals 24 hours a day. Co-location facilities used to collect performance data are located in: Atlanta, GA (InterNAP); Ashburn, VA (AT&T), Boston, MA (AT&T); Chicago, IL (Qwest); Dallas, TX (Verizon MCI); Denver, CO (Verizon MCI), New York, NY (Sprint); Los Angeles, CA (Level 3); San Jose, CA (Verizon MCI); and Seattle, WA (Savvis). -- GPN Testing Agent Gomez tests emulate a standard Web browser across an Internet backbone connection (T1 speed or faster). Data captured and displayed represents the network performance of the transferred data from the perspective of a visitor who is not drawing any page content from a browser or client-side caching server. -- Response Time Response time metrics reflect the time elapsed while downloading a page (including all embedded objects, JavaScripting and cascading style sheets). Data points from each successful test run are collected from the multiple testing nodes around the country and are aggregated to formulate benchmarks. The resulting metric represents the average time required to execute a single page without factoring in user latency. Although reported test response time metrics are unattainable by real users accessing these applications, the metrics serve as performance standards by which companies can gauge site improvement and measure Internet business effectiveness and customer experience. -- Availability Availability measures the percentage of completed transactions. Availability rates are dependent upon a number of variables including availability of the website, ability to process a transaction without error and ability to complete each step of the transaction within a reasonable 60-second time frame. Availability rates do not include server side errors or technical errors incurred due to scripting problems. These errors do occur from time to time and are reflected with a n/a (not available or not applicable) message. -- Consistency Consistency measures the standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions. The goal is to have a low number (in seconds) which indicates how consistent a web site delivers the business process. Usually a high consistency (in seconds) number indicates poor website geographic Internet connectivity or an under-powered technical architecture. (3) According to Jupiter Research's US Online Retail Holiday Forecast, 2007. 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