Amazon Web Services may be the biggest online retailer in the world, but its e-storefront didn't do so well in an independent study of top e-commerce sites in the books, music and games (BMG) category in 2007. In some aspects, it still doesn't compare favorably with other best-of-the-best sites today.
Indeed, in 2007, barnesandnoble.com led the sector in terms of reliability, which is measured by the site's performance along such key factors as high-speed response, response time consistency, geographic uniformity, and load handling. The site also ranked first in availability at 99.6 per cent during peak periods.
But as of September this year, it is borders.com that logging the best performance in terms of speed and responsiveness, followed by abebooks.com and overtstock.com. Amazon comes in fourth, with barnesandnoble.com now coming in a poor sixth.
But even while amazon.com is now ranking the highest in terms of success rate, with no outages, in the BMG sector (it was No.3 in August), its position among the study's top Business 40 sites is at 21st for speed and 20th for reliability.
It's google.com that rules the major players, clocking the best speed in response time among 14 sites that had tied for first place in reliability with 100 per cent execution success rates. Facebook trailed google.com in terms of speed but came in 19th in terms of reliability.
However, the study's qualitative analysis placed amazon.com at the top of the BMG sector, outperforming other sites along the study's brand impact and customer satisfaction indices. Beyond speed and reliability, these indices determined a site's ability to satisfy customers, drive acquisition (a.k.a. get them to buy), and support the company's brand.
This is where the rubber meets the road. Visual appeal, price satisfaction, and the responsiveness of the purchase process were found to be the top factors that drove conversion rates (a.k.a. getting them to buy). Both visual appeal and price satisfaction also determined brand impact and return use (a.k.a. getting them to come back again and again).
The study was conducted by Keynote Systems, a leader in internet and mobile cloud monitoring, headquartered in San Mateo, California. Its avowed mission is to assist its some 3,000 corporate clients into becoming the 'best of the best' by helping them enhance e-commerce site performance and mobile communications quality.
In giving Amazon the highest overall ranking in the BMG sector, Keynote said, "amazon.com leads the way for site excellence in customer experience."
Amazon Web Services posted $24.51 billion in revenues in 2010.
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