A study conducted for the Wall Street Journal Online found that about 4% of over 1,200 eBay searches for "digital camera" conducted over a recent two-week period failed in some way.

Empirix published a report of the results called, "Benchmark Study of Online Auction Site Performance August-September 2003." Included in the study were online auction sites Amazon Auctions, BidVille, eBay, ePier, uBid and Yahoo Auctions.

"We were quite surprised at the transaction failures rates found at some of the sites," noted Joe Alwan, vice president of Marketing for Empirix. "uBid and eBay's failure rates in particular were very high, at one in eight and one in 20 transactions respectively."

Empirix examined the six auction sites using its FarSight service. Virtual user transactions navigated to the home page, searched for "digital camera," clicked through to the first listing and verified that the listing page loaded correctly. The virtual user transactions were repeated at 15-minute intervals, 24 hours a day, at each site from August 31 through September 15, yielding approximately 1,200 data points for each company's Web application.

Alwan also noted wide discrepancies in transaction lengths among the auction sites, ranging from a speedy 3.90 seconds for upstart BidVille to a sluggish 13.20 seconds for eBay. "The bottom line is this study indicates that it takes a customer three times longer to complete a transaction at eBay than it does at BidVille," said Alwan.

A search for "digital camera" on the six sites by AuctionBytes Tuesday evening showed the following results:

eBay: 12050 items
Amazon: 2548 items
Yahoo: 181 items
ePier: 64 items
uBid: 59 items
BidVille: 41 items

While attributing some of the discrepancies in transaction lengths to eBay's larger database of listings, Alwan pointed out that companies should be able to optimize the performance of their Web applications to handle the expected load.

The Wall Street Journals said it commissioned the report when it noticed some frequent sellers complaining on online message boards. They reported that since eBay redesigned its site in June, the changes in the way users can search for auctions "have mucked up the feature."

http://www.empirix.com