Video: Blockbuster and Overstock Face-off in the Cyber Monday Finals of Gomez's 'Merchant Madness' Tournament

LEXINGTON, Mass., Nov. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- As shoppers flock online for their Cyber Monday holiday shopping sprees, Blockbuster and Overstock go head- to-head in the championship finals of Gomez's "Merchant Madness" tournament(1). Since the end of October, "Merchant Madness" has pitted the online performance of 64 retailers' websites(2) in a quest to find the retailer that delivers the fastest, most available and most consistent website performance this holiday season. REI and Zappos were beaten during the tournament's semifinals over the Black Friday weekend. For complete standings, check out the brackets at: www.merchant-madness.com. Gomez will announce the ultimate "Merchant Madness" winner tomorrow, Tuesday, November 27.

To view the Multimedia News Release, go to: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/merchantmadness/30817/

During the course of the contest, the websites of many household brand names including Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Gap, Macy's and HP have all been beaten, highlighting that website performance can be a challenge for even the biggest of brands -- especially during the critical holiday season when the stakes are high, as are the expectations of online shoppers.

"Cyber Monday is when the rubber meets the road for online retailers. Will their websites be able to withstand the peak traffic that is anticipated? Even a minute of outage on Cyber Monday can equate to hundreds of thousands of lost revenue," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance strategies. "Retailers that thoroughly pre-tested their websites way back in the summer -- simulating peak loads that actually mirror their customers' mix of computers -- are best poised to secure their sales."

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