Envive Measures Time It Takes To Buy Online
Sure, shopping online is quicker than getting in your car to travel to
your favorite store, but how much quicker? Mountain View-based
Envive Corp., a provider of e-Business performance management
solutions, has put its technology to use to measure just how long it
takes to complete a transaction at some of the most popular
shopping sites. Envive measured only high speed connections not
dial-up. Though most consumers don’t have high speed
connections at home, recent studies have shown a growing number
of consumers do their online shopping at work over high speed
lines.
Envive tested 27 popular shopping sites every hour. Of those, the
winners for top performance on December 18 include eToys.com,
jcrew.com, landsend.com and amazon.com.
“We essentially went through the process of buying one item at
each site, such as Victoria Secret, deciding on color, size etc. or
other choices at other sites such as Walmarts,” explains Envive
Product Manager Yf Juan. Envive times the entire process up to
the credit card verification. One indication of the unpredictable
nature of Web though was that on the December 18 test date, Juan
notes that one “major office supplies” site was unable to process
transactions the entire day.
Discounting the site unable to process transactions, Envive’s
measurements show the average page response times varied from
1 to 9 seconds. Total time to complete a transaction beginning with
a site’s home page and ending with a credit-card verification varied
from 1 to 5 minutes. Seventy percent of the 27 sites were able to
complete the transaction in 3 minutes or less. A customers
experience from home utilizing a DSL connection was 2 to 5
seconds longer than would have been reported by automated
measurement locations connected to the Internet via T-1 or T-3
communication lines.
“Web site developers have been lead to believe that their site is
meeting customer’s performance expectations when in fact the
customer has been experiencing an additional 2 to 5 seconds of
delay time over what has been reported by previous monitoring
technologies,” says Jeff Tonkel, CEO of Envive. “Additionally,
developers need to know how long it takes a customer to conduct
a transaction, not just a URL request, and Envive is the first to
offer complete transaction monitoring and accurate measurements
via distributed computing.”
Utilizing its “Sensory,” Envive’s service level monitoring hosted
service, the company measures how long it takes to conduct
complete online transactions beginning with a sites home page,
browsing, “think time,” searching, and adding to shopping cart for
check out. The sensors monitor the average page response time
and entire transaction response time every hour, around the clock.
Originally appeared in
siliconvalley.internet.com
David Needle is an experienced technology reporter, based in Silicon Valley. He covers big data, mobile, customer experience, social media, and other topics. He was previously the news editor for Enterprise Apps Today, TabTimes editor, and West Coast bureau chief of Internet.com.