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Lexington, Massachusetts - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - December 19, 2007 -E-commerce firm, Gomez, Inc., has crowned Blockbuster, as the online retailer that delivers the best web experience over the holiday shopping season.

The ”Merchant Madness” tournament engaged the performance of 64 online retailers’ websites, 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 websitesl moved onto the next round. The ”Final Four” match-ups took place on Black Friday (Friday, November 23) with the last two retailers meeting in the finale on Cyber Monday (Monday, November 26.)

The shopper’s experience starts with the homepage. Gomez selected 64 top retail homepages, in four categories (apparel, electronics, mass merchants, and specialty retailers,) to compete in a single - elimination tournament style bracket to determine who is the fastest, most available, and most consistent retailer. 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.

Matt Poepsel, Vice President of performance strategies at Gomez noted, ”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. With over $39 billion on the table in potential online holiday sales — an increase of twenty percent over last year — 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.

Gomez is a 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.

To learn more, please visit: www.gomez.com.

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