'Clicks and mortars' lick wounds after Xmas thrashing

They claim their failure to put a dent in the lead taken by dot-coms is largely attributable to the need to spread their resources between physical and virtual shoppers. Bricks and mortar retailers added that in the absence of mainstream businesses to maintain, dot-coms had the resources to concentrate on technical performance and customer service.

A recent Christmas e-tail survey conducted by silicon.com and Mercury Interactive showed that online book sellers Amazon and BOL were clear leaders ahead of high-street competitors like WHSmith and Waterstone's in terms of web performance and transaction speed over the month of December.

Gennario Castalto, a spokesman for HMV UK, said: "You would expect dot-coms to focus on service availability, this is their raison d'être, if they're not getting this right then you have to ask why are they doing it at all?"

He added: "We are focusing on broader operations. We have to invest across the board. It is taking time to get the website up to the standards of the stores, which after all have been around for years."

Louis Wahl, internet business development manager with Waterstone's, admitted that while the company had increased online business threefold on last year, the internet arm was still not a real competitor to sites like Amazon and BOL.

He added that, as in the case of HMV, diversification of resources and flourishing high-street operations meant less resources could be spent on internet business.

"Waterstone's Online is a fairly minor part of the business as a whole. For pureplay dot-coms it is their bread and butter to make sure performance is top notch, in IT terms we're further down the list, we have to diversify resources more and wind our way through corporate beauracracy," he said.

Patsy Cusworth, marketing executive with WHSmith, said the company would continue to address website performance issues.

"We're continuing to work to improve speed. We were aware that we would be busy over Christmas, but perhaps not as busy as we were. Technical back-up takes time to install and Christmas wasn't the right time to start upgrades. We're taking a different strategy to companies like Amazon, focusing more on customer service than speed, but I wouldn't call that a failure."

Nick Jones, a research analyst with Jupiter, agreed that traditional retailers should not be ashamed by gulf in performance.

He told silicon.com: "Traditional retailers don't have the experience of running online stores but dot-coms live and breathe ecommerce. They're the sole means of revenue, so they'll lovingly polish it," he said.