Comparing Internet Access Speed on Between Ebay and Amazon on Black Friday

Statistics class

Comparing internet access speed on between ebay and amazon on black friday

Introduction

Why is it relevant?

In a world where time is money, that is especially true in the internet retail business, milliseconds can cost companies millions of dollars. A report from Amazon.com states that for every 100 milliseconds that it takes for the website to load, it will cost the company 1% of revenue (Kohavi & Longbotham, 2007). That is a large chunk of money for high volume sites internal retailers to miss out on.

In our research we focused on one of the biggest online retail day of the year, Cyber Monday. It's the Monday after Thanksgiving when Americans are shopping for the holidays so there are high number of users. We focused on eBay and Amazon, which are two of the leading online retail sites in the U.S., and their associated website load time. In the following pages, we will take you through the journey on what we analyzed and how we came to our conclusions.

Internet Performance - Game 7 of the World Series

Our original idea was to take the load times of social website and see if cultural events could slow down the performance. We took the information from Twitter and Facebook over the same period of time as Game 7 of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers. This game had the highest TV rating for any baseball game in seven years, with an estimated 25.4 million people across the U.S. tuning in (Singer, 2011). We got great data for the event but we were unable to come up with the play-by-play in real time to compare when significant events in the game occurred. As a result, we re-focused our attention to the Amazon and eBay load time comparison.

Data Analysis

Internet Performance

We looked for indicators of the online shopping experience during a high-traffic event, namely Cyber Monday. Specifically we looked at indications of slow site response time experienced by users engaged in online shopping. We compared data collected from 11/21/11 (the Monday prior to Cyber Monday), and 11/28/11, Cyber Monday. Our ultimate goal is to provide information to retailers so that technology decisions can be made to provide the best online shopping experience to their customers.

Amazon vs. eBay

Our sample size was over 50,000 data points which provided the information regarding internet connection data for both November 21, 2011 and November 28, 2011. The 21st is the Monday before Black Friday and the 28th is Cyber Monday. The data was evaluated and analyzed from both days and complied the connection rate and connection speed for each website.

Both days were consistent with each other in our findings, with Amazon.com having a higher connection rate than eBay. On 11/21, Amazon outperformed eBay by 1.8% and on 11/28 they outperformed by 2.06%. The connection rate was almost identical from day to day, Amazon was in the high 96% and eBay was in the high 94%.

November 21, 2011 (12:00am - 2:58pm PDT)

Connection Rate Successful Total Percentage

Amazon.com 31381 32458 96.68%

eBay.com 20102 21186 94.88%

Connection Speed Number Speed Average

Amazon.com 31381 20600986 656.48

eBay.com 20102 14883936 740.42

November 28, 2011 (12:00am - 2:58pm PDT)

Connection Rate Successful Total Percentage

Amazon.com 32651 33714 96.85%

eBay.com 21054 22211 94.79%

Connection Speed Number Speed Average

Amazon.com 32651 21814207 668.10

eBay.com 21054 15849100 752.78

The most revealing information discovered, was the connection speed and the relationship to the connection rate. When I compiled the connection speed of each site, eBay took 84 milliseconds longer to load than Amazon. What we interpreted is that the website that took longer to load (eBay) had a lower connection rate.

Sample Mean Comparison

In order to confirm that there is significant evidence to say that the means of Amazon and eBay are different, we ran a t-test with the data from November 21st. We used a level of significance of 95% and used a two-tailed test. The sample size was so large that it came close to representing the population. As expected the t-test statistic came out with a value of -49.117 and the lower critical value is -1.96 so we can confidently reject the null hypothesis.

Pooled Variance t-Test

Hypothesized Difference 0

Level of Significance 0.05

Amazon.com Sample

Sample Size 31381

Sample Mean 656.480

Sample Standard Deviation 199.460

eBay.com Sample

Sample Size 20102

Sample Mean 740.421

Sample Standard Deviation 171.888

Intermediate Calculations

Amazon.com Degrees of Freedom 31380

eBay.com Degrees of Freedom 20101

Total Degrees of Freedom 51481

Pooled Variance 35786.474

Standard Error 1.709

Difference in Sample Means -83.941

t Test Statistic -49.117

Two-Tail Test

Lower Critical Value -1.960

Upper Critical Value 1.960

p-value 0.000

Reject the null hypothesis

Date Mean Comparison

The next hypothesis we wanted to test was if the difference in connection speed from November 21st and November 28th was significant. We combined both sites data and