Dell under attack for unreliable downloads

E-commerce - Jyra test highlights poor performance in UK Net site.

Dell's reputation for e-commerce excellence has come under fire after performance tests showed that in more than a third of cases, its home page fails to download.

Research on the performance of Dell's UK e-commerce site, conducted by application performance tester Jyra, showed that in 36 per cent of cases the page does not download first time around.

Most browsers will cover up this problem by automatically retrying, but this means download times for users can be extended by about 15 seconds.

'Dell has a fast site - when it can be reached,' said Toby Rees, European technical consultant at Jyra Research. 'Unfortunately, it is let down by the number of failures when attempting to retrieve the home page.'

During the tests, the time taken for each Website to download its home page was recorded once every 30 minutes over the course of a week, using Jyra's Java-based service management technology.

The testing looked at sites from Dell, Compaq, Hewlett Packard and IBM.

Dell's site showed the worst performance when it came to both errors in downloading the full page and every item on a page.

Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell, said industry demand for the quarter was solid. He added that sales via Dell's Website surpassed $18 million (£11.3 million per day during the last quarter, accounting for 30 per cent of overall revenue).

Jerry Gregoire, chief information officer at Dell, told an audience at the recent Giga Information Group's Gigaworld IT Forum that creating an unmatchable user experience online was the secret of the direct PC vendor's success.

'In a diminishing world of goods and services, experience counts and those who do it the best will win,' said Gregoire.

Dell admitted that not all of the sales were actually taken online. Much of the company's revenue came from products viewed online. But he stressed the pivotal and growing importance of the firm's Web presence.

'We're increasingly applying the internet to the entire business - from component design to user support - making it easier to do business with Dell, enhancing relationships with customers and suppliers and reducing costs,' the Dell chief executive added.

Dell posted a 42 per cent rise in profit for its first quarter. The direct manufacturer reported net income of $434 million, compared with $305 million in the same period a year ago.

Revenue for the period exceeded $5.5 billion, up from $3.92 billion.