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  20% of shopping carts did not function for 12 hours a month or more.

●

  75% failed the standard service level availability of 99.9% uptime.

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  80% performed inconsistently with widely varying response times,  time-  outs and 

errors – leaving customers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable 

to complete their purchases.

Similarly, SciVisum, a  web-  testing specialist, found that  three-  quarters of Internet 

marketing campaigns are impacted by website failures, with 14% of failures so severe 

that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company surveyed 

marketing professionals from 100 UK-based organisations across the retail, financial, 

travel and online gaming sectors. More than a third of failures were rated as ‘serious 

to severe’, with many customers complaining or unable to complete web transactions. 

These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are owned by others 

in the business, but marketers need to ask the right questions. The SciVisum (2005) 

research showed that nearly  two-  thirds of marketing professionals did not know how 

many users making transactions their websites could support, despite an average 

transaction value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into campaign 

plans.  Thirty-  seven per cent could not put a monetary value on losses caused by cus-

tomers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organisations experienced website 

overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication between the two 

departments.

SciVisum recommends that companies do the following:

  1 

Define the peak visitor throughput requirements for each customer journey on the 

site. For example, the site should be able to support at the same time: approxi-

mately ten checkout journeys per second, thirty add-to-basket journeys per sec-

ond, five registration journeys per second, two check-my- order-  status journeys per 

second.

  2 

 Service-  level agreement. More detailed technical requirements need to be agreed 

for each of the transaction stages.  Home-  page delivery time and server uptime are 

insufficiently detailed.