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Telematics – an intelligent future, like it or not
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Newsletter 41
Grocery web shopping sites 'can be slow to load'
Asda’s home shopping web site loads on to users’ screens more than twice as quickly on average as Sainsbury’s, when the latter is accessed via its .co.uk domain name. This is among findings of a “last mile peer community” testing programme run by Gomez, a web application experience management specialist. The company tested half a dozen leading online grocery companies’ web sites over a seven-day period, using a large number of home broadband connections. Top came Asda.com, with an average response time of 7.754 seconds, then Tesco.com (8.359). Sainsbury’s came third when accessed via its Sainsburys.com/grocers URL (10.460). Trailing behind were Marksandspencer.com (11.13) and Ocado.com (12.241), and finally Sainsbury.co.uk (just over 24 seconds). However, Ocado’s availability was considered best of all. Gomez questions why some of the retailers offer more than one entry point, even though some are poorer than others in access time. It also warns that a long loading time can easily lose these companies business to rivals. 
Out of curiosity, here at On Track & On Target we tried accessing the Asda site and both the Sainsbury’s sites, using the highly unscientific sample rate of one attempt each, and in each case our experience almost exactly matched that of Gomez. We measured the time taken from hitting the Enter key to the time when all the graphics and screen furniture had finished loading on to our screen.
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