Maybe 2000 just wasn't Amazon's year. In addition to the business problems mentioned above, Amazon had technical problems during the holiday shopping season its Web site was down three times between November 24 and December 5, just when holiday shopping kicked into high gear. Needless to say, if your Web site isn't available when customers want to use it, you're going to lose sales as a result.
Availability is only the first standard of technical excellence.
Other important factors are performance, stability, reliability, and security. Performance goes hand in hand with availability. Web sites need to be up, and they need to respond quickly. For the first few years of e-business, Web surfers would, on average, give a page seven seconds to load before clicking away. The latest studies show that Web users are increasingly impatient, even expecting response times of as little as one second, which is the old standard for local online systems.