Retail Website Performance Put to the Test in Gomez’s “Merchant Madness” Holiday TournamentAmazon, Target, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart are Eliminated in First Round TestingLEXINGTON, Mass., November 7, 2007 – 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’ websites1 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 websites2 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 year3 – 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 GomezGomez 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 3 According to Jupiter Research’s US Online Retail Holiday Forecast, 2007. Note to Editors:Gomez’s Matt Poepsel is available for expert commentary on online retailing and web experience best practices. Poepsel’s public speaking experience includes presentations at the Internet Retailer, Retail Business Show, eMarketing East and eTail conferences. Poepsel’s articles and quotes about best practices in online retailing have appeared in publications including CIO Insight, CNBC, DM News, E–Commerce Times, etailer, eWeek, InformationWeek and Internet Retailer.
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