Press release

6 April, 2004 - Glastonbury Ticket Shambles Bad Apple for Ecommerce, Warns SciVisum ...Highlights Need for Pretesting of Internet Systems...

The Glastonbury e-ticketing fiasco has tarnished ecommerce for millions of UK consumers and UK ecommerce sites must act rapidly to put their houses in order, warned Internet tester SciVisum today.

Following the collapse of Glastonbury’s online booking system for this year’s hugely popular music festival, many customers have now discovered the system had processed purchases of more tickets than they wanted, or left them with none at all.

“Glastonbury this year will always be remembered for the wrong reasons. The e-ticketing shambles is a ‘bad apple’ that has now tarnished Internet purchasing for millions of UK consumers,” said Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum.

“UK ecommerce sites must act rapidly to put their houses in order - or risk unhappy consumers tarring them with the same brush. What happened could easily have been avoided with some simple forethought: most obviously, it highlights the need for pretesting of Internet sites – in particular, testing the functionality and usability of the system with a variety of different user scenarios, including at heavy loads. This would have quickly found the problem areas for the organisers to put a revised system in place.

“For starters, we’d never recommend using the full ticketing process to handle such intensive demand. Haven’t these guys ever been to a deli counter at the supermarket? The ones that give you a numbered ticket? Exactly that model could have worked for Glastonbury - you put in your name only, number of tickets you want, and get given a unique UserID. No credit card handling, no addresses. Nice and fast. Then after the queue has subsided, users can go back with their unique IDs and finish the credit card formalities at a later date.”

“In our experience, unfortunately it’s all to common for a web application that works with a certain load level to collapse under a load only two or three times as high, no matter what hardware the web front end servers are on. Bottlenecks in functionality can only be found out by in-depth functional testing – in advance.”

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About SciVisum
SciVisum delivers engineered web systems monitoring services to help UK businesses measure and improve the performance and functionality of business critical Web based systems. The company’s in-house research and development, and an unique test methodology enable testing and monitoring of complex web based applications, taking test services beyond website performance to incorporate user functionality. This includes sophisticated web systems and complex functionality such as online order processing, shopping carts, banking applications, auction systems and utilities online billing.

SciVisum offers customers an unique ‘build & buy’ approach, tailoring semi-automated services to clients’ exact requirements. This provides the flexible benefits of consultancy but with clearly defined services, at off the shelf prices and with fast implementation. The company is backed by a senior management team with substantial Internet industry experience, including core roles in the foundation of UK Internet service provider PSINet and the development and marketing of high profile online applications. More information is available at www.scivisum.co.uk

Media contacts

Emma Ballard/Sarra Mander
Rainier PR
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494 6570
Email: eballard@rainierpr.co.uk/smander@rainierpr.co.uk