Keeping Up with Amazon

Today, the company sells more than 450 million items online. In 2015, it sold more than $107 billion worth of merchandise online. The entire US ecommerce market was worth $341.8 billion last year. Other retailers may never be able to match Amazon’s reach, inventory, or technology back end and know-how. But they can match or even beat Amazon in the customer experience they deliver.

Along the way, it’s entered the cloud computing business, produces its own TV shows which it streams on its own video-on-demand service, and designs and sells its own hardware devices. And it’s moving into physical retail stores, opening a brick-and-mortar store in Seattle, with plans to open more stores in the near future. In short, Amazon has become the 800-pound gorilla.

Established or startup online retailers or brick-and-mortar retailers looking to build and grow their online presence have to contend with Amazon at some point. Other retailers may never be able to match Amazon’s reach, inventory, or technology back end and know-how. But they can match or even beat Amazon in the customer experience they deliver.

We’ve chronicled some of their recent stumbles on our blog, including a 20-minute site outage in March and a 3 ½-hour search engine outage in June. Still, it generally scores high in availability. White it’s not the fastest site in the world, it generally does well in the most important metrics and outstanding.

Contrast that with some very high-profile retail site outages during that same holiday shopping season, including Target on Cyber Monday and Neiman Marcus on Black Friday. Failing on peak holiday shopping days or when site wide sales and free shipping promotions take place, is failing to compete with Amazon.

But what about Amazon’s day-to-day performance? A look at our Q1 ecommerce performance benchmarks shows that Amazon is relatively slow in document complete time—the average time it takes for webpage to become interactive—at 3.57 milliseconds.