I. M. Esperto
21st May 2002, 13:20
http://www.iht.com/articles/58389.html
Web's weak link: tracking glitches
Bob Tedeschi The New York Times Tuesday, May 21, 2002
When United Airlines inadvertently sold tickets on its Web site last Tuesday for $5 apiece, it was simply another example in the struggle by Internet merchants to keep their computer systems from acting like disgruntled employees.
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A United spokeswoman, Chris Nardella, said the company did not detect the problem for about 50 minutes, during which time consumers were able to buy $5 seats on all flights from and through Chicago and Denver. Nardella said United sold about 1,000 of the cheap tickets, which it will honor, before it shut down the online booking engine for a half-hour and fixed the problem.
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The fact that United, part of UAL Corp., was unaware of the problem for nearly an hour points to what analysts see as one of the more glaring weaknesses among e-commerce sites. Not only are Web merchants often oblivious to site malfunctions, but even once they become aware of the problems, they are often unable to determine their cause quickly and fix them.
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The lucky United ticket buyers were probably not complaining, but most Web-site glitches - in which users are shown strings of baffling error messages, for example, or have their filled shopping carts randomly cleared - are infuriating to customers.
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"Most Internet companies are doing well at keeping their sites up and running, and some of the more advanced ones are also looking at how fast the site is, but nobody's really looking at whether the poor customer is receiving the right information," said Jean-Pierre Garbani, research director at Giga Information Group, a technology consulting firm.
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Because of a dearth of suitable technology, Garbani said, most sites have no systems in place for monitoring the rate at which consumers succeed in performing basic tasks, such as registering, checking out or performing a search. Instead, sites typically rely on log files, which record the Web pages each user visits.
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Sometimes site operators discern a problem by noticing, say, that half of the people who filled a shopping cart with a certain item suddenly logged off without buying. But log files simply record the page each user visits.
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As a result, when the technology team tries to fix a problem, it is often unable to re-create the precise conditions of the mishap.
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That was the problem that dogged TowerRecords.com. Lisa Scovel, who was the site's senior producer until leaving the company earlier this year, recalled that the customer service team began fielding complaints last year from international customers whose shopping carts were being emptied when they placed multiple items in them.
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"International customers tended to place really large orders, so they could minimize shipping charges," Scovel said. But every time the site's international customers tried to put more than a dozen or so CDs into the cart, the cart would suddenly show up empty.
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Scovel also said that when many of the site's visitors used the search engine, they would get error messages instead of search results. "But we couldn't figure out what was happening," she said, "because even though we knew the final result, we didn't know what the users had been trying to search for."
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Late last year the company installed a testing system, using software from TeaLeaf Technology Inc., a San Francisco company.
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Garbani said TeaLeaf's technology, which sells for about $40,000, was the only one he knew of that captured and stored each click and keystroke from each visitor.
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Though TeaLeaf has helped some sites reduce error messages, other sites must apply more labor-intensive methods to quality control. Phil Terry, chief executive of Creative Good, a New York-based consulting firm, said his company had worked with a number of sites recently, looking at patterns in the log files while also observing focus groups as they tried to navigate the site.
.
Such an approach can be useful, Terry said, particularly when 20 to 30 of the site's employees and executives are watching along.
Web's weak link: tracking glitches
Bob Tedeschi The New York Times Tuesday, May 21, 2002
When United Airlines inadvertently sold tickets on its Web site last Tuesday for $5 apiece, it was simply another example in the struggle by Internet merchants to keep their computer systems from acting like disgruntled employees.
.
A United spokeswoman, Chris Nardella, said the company did not detect the problem for about 50 minutes, during which time consumers were able to buy $5 seats on all flights from and through Chicago and Denver. Nardella said United sold about 1,000 of the cheap tickets, which it will honor, before it shut down the online booking engine for a half-hour and fixed the problem.
.
The fact that United, part of UAL Corp., was unaware of the problem for nearly an hour points to what analysts see as one of the more glaring weaknesses among e-commerce sites. Not only are Web merchants often oblivious to site malfunctions, but even once they become aware of the problems, they are often unable to determine their cause quickly and fix them.
.
The lucky United ticket buyers were probably not complaining, but most Web-site glitches - in which users are shown strings of baffling error messages, for example, or have their filled shopping carts randomly cleared - are infuriating to customers.
.
"Most Internet companies are doing well at keeping their sites up and running, and some of the more advanced ones are also looking at how fast the site is, but nobody's really looking at whether the poor customer is receiving the right information," said Jean-Pierre Garbani, research director at Giga Information Group, a technology consulting firm.
.
Because of a dearth of suitable technology, Garbani said, most sites have no systems in place for monitoring the rate at which consumers succeed in performing basic tasks, such as registering, checking out or performing a search. Instead, sites typically rely on log files, which record the Web pages each user visits.
.
Sometimes site operators discern a problem by noticing, say, that half of the people who filled a shopping cart with a certain item suddenly logged off without buying. But log files simply record the page each user visits.
.
As a result, when the technology team tries to fix a problem, it is often unable to re-create the precise conditions of the mishap.
.
That was the problem that dogged TowerRecords.com. Lisa Scovel, who was the site's senior producer until leaving the company earlier this year, recalled that the customer service team began fielding complaints last year from international customers whose shopping carts were being emptied when they placed multiple items in them.
.
"International customers tended to place really large orders, so they could minimize shipping charges," Scovel said. But every time the site's international customers tried to put more than a dozen or so CDs into the cart, the cart would suddenly show up empty.
.
Scovel also said that when many of the site's visitors used the search engine, they would get error messages instead of search results. "But we couldn't figure out what was happening," she said, "because even though we knew the final result, we didn't know what the users had been trying to search for."
.
Late last year the company installed a testing system, using software from TeaLeaf Technology Inc., a San Francisco company.
.
Garbani said TeaLeaf's technology, which sells for about $40,000, was the only one he knew of that captured and stored each click and keystroke from each visitor.
.
Though TeaLeaf has helped some sites reduce error messages, other sites must apply more labor-intensive methods to quality control. Phil Terry, chief executive of Creative Good, a New York-based consulting firm, said his company had worked with a number of sites recently, looking at patterns in the log files while also observing focus groups as they tried to navigate the site.
.
Such an approach can be useful, Terry said, particularly when 20 to 30 of the site's employees and executives are watching along.