Luxury brands such as Rolls-Royce, Porsche and Ralph Lauren solidified their authority as masters of Web site response time and availability, based on the findings of a study released by AlertSite.
Rolls-Royce, BMW, Ralph Lauren and Prada led the pack with the fastest response times. They beat out Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, who had the lowest response times. “One of the things is the fact that luxury retail items are competing for share,” said Gary Beerman, Coconut Creek, FL-based vice president of product management for AlertSite. “Response time is more important than site availability because if a luxury consumer goes to look on your site, she probably already has an idea of what she wants,” he said. “If the page takes a long time to load, then there’s a good chance that they will leave for a competitor.” AlertSite, recently acquired by SmartBear, monitored the homepages of these luxury brands from 12 U.S. locations every five minutes from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time between March 1 and June 30. 0-17.5 The industry standard is that a brand’s Web site has to load within four seconds, or the probability that the consumers will leave the page is quite high, according to Mr. Beerman. Ralph Lauren’s site response time is a 1.15-second average response time, followed closely by Prada at 1.23 seconds and Chanel at 1.30 seconds.
Ralph Lauren site
Trailing behind was Hugo Boss, the longest at a 7.78-second average response time , Calvin Klein a little faster at 5.76 seconds and Tag Heuer at 5.19 seconds.
“Hugo Boss’ Web site took so long to load because it is Flash-heavy with a video,” Mr. Beerman said.
In the automotive sector, Rolls-Royce had the fastest response time at an 0.81-second average. BMW and Porsche followed at 1.91 seconds and 2.38 seconds, respectively.
Automakers’ Web sites that had the slowest response times were Mercedes-Benz at 17.5 seconds, Audi at 15.99 seconds and Aston Martin at 6.72 seconds.
Mercedes' site
“Retailers have a greater cognizance of response time than automakers do, and response time is very important,” Mr. Beerman said. “Even the slowest retailer response time is more than half of the slowest automaker’s response time.”
Avail travail
The brands were also measured on Web site availability.
Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton and Prada all had the highest retailer Web site availability, weighing in at 99.97 percent, 99.96 percent and 99.95 percent, respectively.
On the other hand, Calvin Klein, Burberry and Christian Dior were the least available Web sites with 99.10 percent, 99.46 percent and 99.58 percent reliability, respectively.
For the retailers, Porsche and Lamborghini topped the charts with 99.99 percent availability followed by BMW at 99.98 percent.
Lexus, Maserati and Jaguar were the least-reliable automaker sites at 99.20 percent, 99.33 percent and 99.36 percent.
AlertSite measures these response times and availability every quarter.
Prada's site
Most brands seem to be improving.
For instance, this is the second consecutive quarter that Rolls-Royce had the fastest average response time.
Indeed, both Lamborghini and Porsche increased in site reliability from last quarter, where the former was at 99.94 percent reliability and the latter at 99.93 percent.
Watchmaker Tag Heuer also dramatically increased its response time from last quarter, per Mr. Beerman.
“All of the sites are over 99 percent availability, which is excellent,” Mr. Beerman said. “But now that they all have reliability, they need to make sure that consumers want to stay on their sites.”
Final Take
Rachel Lamb, associate reporter on Luxury Daily, New York