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As the percentage of consumers buying online continues to steadily increase each year, I'd expect the emphasis put on website performance by retailers would also increase. Let's see how our highlighted retailers — 1-800-Flowers.com, Williams-Sonoma and J.C. Penney — performed for Mother's Day shoppers.
In this month's edition of SmartBear Software's Retailer Web Performance Report Card, the website performances of Nike and Blockbuster are examined. The idea behind this column is to help retailers deliver a great online user experience for the purpose of positively impacting business performance. I hope that retailers are continuously monitoring quality in terms of website availability, performance and user experience. With the help of SmartBear's AlertSite, I've looked at website response times and availability percentages from April 1 to April 16. For better or worse, Nike and Blockbuster are our featured retailers this month.
In this month's edition of SmartBear Software's Retailer Web Performance Report Card, I once again analyze and highlight recent website performance for the top 50 retailers. With the help of SmartBear's AlertSite, I've looked at website response times, accounting for elapsed time for all website objects including images, JavaScript, Flash and third-party objects, collected from various dispersed locations in the first two weeks of March. I also looked at the all-important website availability percentage that measures site accessibility. The lucky (and not so lucky) highlighted retailers this month are Target and J.Crew, respectively.
For this installment of the Retailer Web Performance Report Card, I looked specifically at response times and availability for big-box retailers Wal-Mart and Home Depot, as well as wholesale warehouse giant Costco. Despite relying heavily on brick-and-mortar locations, these retailers need to keep online shoppers a priority. The stress of managing busy holiday web traffic is over and the industry is in transition before spring, but website monitoring and attention to online visitors shouldn't take a break.
The holidays are over, but retailers’ websites need to operate optimally throughout the year for maximum revenue. SmartBear's AlertSite checks how retailers’ websites perform with respect to availability and response times, two critical elements I hope retailers have on their list of New Year's resolutions. So far, while there's always room for improvement, I like what I'm seeing in terms of site availability for many of the retailers. For response times, I hope many listen up and heed the warnings.
