Performance varies widely within online-only and brick-and-mortar categories

How fast are these bracelets?

Mother’s day is a big time of year for jewelers.  According to a survey by the National Retail Federation, 31 percent of American consumers are planning to buy jewelry for the holiday this year.  Clearly there’s a lot of revenue at stake for jewelry retailers seeking to capitalize on that consumer willingness.

This pressure applies equally to e-commerce jewelers.  Online jewelry sales is big business: Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide counts 15 jewelers among its list of the 500 biggest e-commerce vendors.  Those 15 sites accounted for over $1 billion in category sales in 2010.

Website performance matters for any e-commerce vendor, but the issue takes on a distinctive hue when it comes to big-ticket items like jewelry.  As one might expect, average order size at online jewelry stores is consistently larger than at stores in other categories.  The largest jewelry e-retailer, for example, had an average order of nearly $1700 dollars in 2010.  What other B2C industry can boast such consistently large orders over the Internet?

These big orders mean that each visitor represents a large revenue opportunity—to lose any customers to a competitor because of a slow website would be distressing for any jewelry website owner.  With this in mind, we wanted to find out how some of the top jewelers stacked up in performance.  We compiled a performance benchmark including 15 jewelry sites in the Top 500 list, and tracked their performance. Click to see the results.

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This weekend marked the third New England Givecamp in Boston.  From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, over 150 volunteers provided technology solutions for 29 non-profits in a “community codefest.” Designers, developers, database pros and project managers alike donated their time to provide custom solutions for the organizations, including websites, applications, CMS customizations, office automation and more.

The Boston event was organized by Jim O’Neil, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft (Northeast US); Kelley Muir, Business Analyst; Ektron, an Enterprise Web Content Management system; and countless other volunteers and sponsors.

Jim O'Neil and Kelley Muir

The technology sponsors included Microsoft, Telerik, Twilio, Mashery, 10gen and Yottaa, among many others.  Microsoft’s New England Research and Development office and community center hosted the event, and thirty four other sponsors donated food and financial support.

Yottaa sat down with several of the groups on Sunday to learn about what they accomplished over the weekend.  Read on for three stories of GiveCamp in action!

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We are convinced that web performance challenges can be met with knowledge and access to data.  The problem is that as web pages grow heavier and more complex, so grows the amount and variety of performance data.  Developers need smarter tools to sift through this performance data, figure out where the bottlenecks are and what to do to fix them.

That’s why the Yottaa team developed our new waterfall chart. Starting from March 2012, all Yottaa users have access to the most powerful waterfall chart, ever.

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Each week Yottaa CTO Bob Buffone digs into the data and evaluates the web performance of a new website.  Recommend a site for next week’s Expert Eval in the comments below or @Yottaa on Twitter! #ExpertEval

This week’s web performance review is for www.Grammy.com, which is built on Drupal.  The site is currently number 9,514 in the Alexa ranking, meaning simply that it gets a whole lot of traffic in the full scheme of the Web.  Unfortunately for all those visitors, the site takes about 20 seconds to download globally.  (See graph below or visit Yottaa’s profile page for Grammy.com for more detail)

It goes without saying that 20 seconds is way too long for a website to load. But a trained eye will notice that perhaps even more jarring than the long load time is the size of the page: 5.6MB — yes, megabytes!  Displaying the homepage calls for 4.6 megabytes of images alone.

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The 2nd wave of cloud debate

Cloud Computing has reached a new adoption milestone, evident when recently the core debate about cloud computing has moved toward whether any given technology company will eventually outgrow a public cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS), instead of whether to work with the public cloud or a private cloud. We believe that cloud computing is a cost effective solution, no matter the size of your business.

I recently spoke with Derrick Harris at GigaOm about this very topic.  It was nice to have the opportunity to share Yottaa’s cloud story and explain the company’s hybrid cloud approach. At Yottaa, we took a very unique approach to build our infrastructure. We use Amazon AWS extensively, from EC2, S3, ELB, EBS, SQS, CloudFront to IAM and plan to add a few others soon. We also use quite a few other cloud providers such as Microsoft and Voxel.   Beyond that, we built our own physical data centers as well.  Our network covers over 24 global data centers today. We call this a “hybrid cloud” or “a hybrid network.”

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