Slow pages and site crashes still hurt many retail web sites

[mandy]

The web retailing market is now more than a decade old and in that time the telecommunications industry has invested billions of dollars in building a global Internet infrastructure, while retailers have spent millions of dollars of their own investing in state-of-the-art e-commerce sites and online merchandising programs.

But as evidenced by several high profile incidents, including Walmart.com’s much publicized crash for several hours on the Friday after Thanksgiving and similar incidents at such retailers as Amazon.com, Macys.com and Overstock.com, the online retailing industry is still guilty of inconsistent web site performance. In fact, Internet Retailer’s latest monthly survey—this one on how web retailers troubleshoot performance issues—clearly suggests that merchants have a long way to go in implementing programs and procedures that eliminate site crashes and slow-loading pages...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=21575