Diner’s Club Tops New Test of Credit Card Sites

The Web site for specialty charge card issuer Diner's Club scored 100% reliability and topped a new weekly test of both reliability and response time at nine credit card Web sites. The Diner's site posted a response time of 7.03 seconds, significantly ahead of the second-place site, Capital One (8.20 seconds). Ranking second in the test of reliability, or success rate, is the site for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., at 99.82%. The worst-performing site in response time is that of Citibank, at 20.62 seconds. Citi's site is second-from-the-bottom in reliability, at 96.50%, better only than Capital One's site, at 96.39%. Ironically, Citbank and Diner's Club are owned by the same parent company, Citigroup Inc. The average response time for the group of major card sites measured is 12.75 seconds; the average reliability, 98.69%. The test was conducted for the week of Oct. 4 by Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based Web performance-measurement company. The results, published today, will be updated each week as part of a new index of credit card Web site performance Keynote announced in August (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 16). The index measures those sites mentioned above as well as those of Providian, Discover Card, Bank One, First USA, and MBNA. Bank One and First USA no longer exist as independent companies, having been absorbed by J.P. Morgan Chase, but their brands are still supported by live sites. Keynote cites the increasing willingness of consumers to use card companies' sites to view statements and pay bills as chief reasons to inaugurate the performance index. The company points to a Yankee Group report released in April that showed 13% of consumers in the U.S. pay their credit card bills online, while 14% receive and view their statements on billers' sites. Keynote attributes this largely to consumers' fear of fraud and identity theft. “Rather than wait for their monthly credit card statements, more people are going to the Web sites run by their credit card providers to make sure there have been no unauthorized charges during the month,” says Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote, in a statement. This, he says, heightens the need among site operators to monitor performance. The company says it hopes its new index will help card issuers measure and improve site performance for consumers viewing bills and paying them online. To compile the new index, Keynote computers in 10 U.S. cities mimic the steps a consumer might perform, including entering a URL, logging in, running through steps to view recent charges, and logging out.