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San Mateo, California - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - January 26, 2007 - Industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, Keynote Competitive Research, has released its Keynote Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices, designed to track the speed and reliability from the end user perspective of 24 leading online retail sites across three categories: apparel, books and music, electronics.

The three indices replace Keynote’s single e-commerce index, and provide the market with a deeper, more comprehensive window into the technical performance of online retailing today. With the online retailing market expected to reach $108.5 billion in the U.S. in 2006 (according to eMarketer), the indices better reflect the industry’s increasing breadth and importance to the overall U.S. economy. The new retail indices provide the industry and individual retailers with an ideal set of internal and external performance benchmarks with which to judge online success.

Ric Kern, publisher at E-Commerce Times remarked,“The E-Commerce Times is pleased to host Keynote’s new Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices on its web site. Web site performance is vital to the success of a company’s online sales – and the leading e-commerce retailers being monitored by Keynote must do everything they can to ensure their sites are operating at a maximum level of performance 24/7.”

Mr. Kern continued “We believe the ultimate result of online retailers competing for the top spots on Keynote’s performance rankings will be an overall improvement in the consumer’s online experience. As we begin the fourth consecutive year of publishing Keynote’s Web Transaction results, the E-Commerce Times is looking forward to seeing even greater benefits to the online consumer from this initiative.”

The new retail indices, including all data points captured by Keynote, are available for purchase, both in bulk form and in a management level report (prices begin at $3,000 per month per index).

The Keynote New Web Transaction Performance Indices for Online Retailers, Include the following:

• New weekly indices track the speed and reliability for performing retail web transactions from 10 U.S. cities from end user perspective
• Zappos led last week in both speed and reliability on apparel index
• Wal-Mart leads in speed and Barnes and Noble in reliability on books and music index
• Office Depot leads in speed and CDW in reliability on electronics index
• Indices an enhancement of Keynote’s original e-commerce index; Data gathered by Keynote Transaction Perspective, the industry and technology standard for accuracy in web site monitoring; Indices now track ‘outage hours’ of each site
• Indices to appear weekly on Keynote’s web site and on the site of E-Commerce Times, its publishing partner

Ben Rushlo, Senior Manager, Competitive Research with Keynote explained “Keynote has found from examining the preliminary data that there is still a large gap between the best in class sites (sites who do well in both overall performance and overall availability) and those who need to improve to provide the best possible experience for their customers. The Electronics sites seem to do especially well in overall availability, while more of the Apparel sites struggle in this metric. Many of the errors captured in the preliminary data are with the search process or with adding the product to the cart. This illustrates the need for a multi-step transactional index as opposed to simply measuring the sites’ Home Page – a page that typically is highly available.”

Mr. Rushlo continued, “Especially critical is the number of Outage Hours. This new metric, now included as part of Keynote’s transaction indices, indicates that during the hour a significant number of users (from various geographic locations) were unable to complete the measured path – shopping and adding a product to the cart. Ideally a site should have not a single outage during the week and many of the sites do achieve this goal. Other sites however, consistently struggle to not have at least one major negative event during the week.”

Mr. Rushlo concluded, “Performance was the best for the Electronics sites and the poorest for the Books and Music sites in general. The overall performance metrics are a summation of the total download time of all the pages measured on the site. It is equally important to understand the variation in performance – both over the day, which indicates the site’s ability to handle load, and over the week, which is a good marker for overall site health – and this data is available for purchase as part of the index product.”

To learn more about the indices, please visit: www.keynote.com/solutions/performance_indices/retail/retail.html.