E-Turkeys Could get stuffed this Christmas
The first E-Christmas is upon us ! Will e-commerce sites cope?

PSINet and Jyra will help you to maximise the effectiveness of your eCommerce service and succeed in the largest market the world has ever known. It is by measuring and managing the response time your web site delivers to customers that PSINet and Jyra will help you make the most of this opportunity.

Blaine Mathieu, Senior Industry Analyst for Dataquest, predicts that the future of eCommerce will be shaped during the 1999 Christmas season, setting the scene for the way to shop in the new millennium. "While 1998 was the year that online shopping first rose to prominence, the 1999 Christmas gift season is shaping up to be the launching point for an explosion of global consumer eCommerce," said Mathieu. "The mainstream is primed: extensive publicity of consumer eCommerce has significantly raised awareness of online shopping. Increased growth of PCs online and free Internet accounts will greatly increase the total available market for Christmas gift shoppers, particularly outside the United States."

However, slow download times, the bane of an online shopper's existence, could mean some .com companies having a Christmas in the red. A report by Zona Research, "The Need for Speed", found that more than one-third of Web users may simply give up trying to buy an item over the Internet when frustrated with an online shopping experience. With the advancement of technology, the increase in Web traffic and the desire to place more visually appealing content on Web pages, slow download times are posing a sizeable economic risk, according to the report. The upper limit of acceptance for Web page download times is 8 seconds, according to Zona.

Knowing what your customers are experiencing when dealing with your organisation is just good business sense. Poor management consumes your time, your customers time, costs money and compromises both your brand and reputation. With today's consumer choice no organisation can ignore the one key driver - service.

Web page response time and simple, clear page navigation are the two main ingredients for a satisfied customer; in the past these customer service attributes were conveyed and practised by the employees of a company. Although this is still the case, today's businesses must be more reliant on technology; an area that needs to convey to the customer the same level of service. The Web site is now the salesman, technical advisor and the customer care department. If your Web site is slow, your shop's service is slow.

For eCommerce sites to win customers they need to be delivering 8 second response times consistently, especially during peak periods. One site studied shows how midday peak response times can climb to a customer waiting 145 seconds.

Response times for the above-mentioned site, a major on-line airline reservation system, are steady overnight at around 20,000 milliseconds - 20 seconds. At 9.00am response time deteriorates rapidly to around 50 seconds and by 9.30am the site goes offline altogether for 33 minutes. Performance from then on is sporadic, ranging from 20 seconds but mainly around 50 seconds, until lunchtime when it goes offline again. Research published on www.cyberatlas.com indicates that most people book holidays from their workplace and do so mainly at lunchtime.

This site is not customer ready! It is not a tool with which to sell airline seats. In fact, it is more likely to turn potential business towards the competition. It is clearly a service that is not monitored and, so, is not provided. Customers are turned away at the busiest times as the system reaches capacity, causing an unsustainable loss of business.

If you can't measure the response time you can't manage it. Working together with PSINet and Jyra In-Site can help respond to customers in the way you really want to. We look after the technology so that you can look after the business.