Online merchants may be throwing away 25% of their business this holiday season, an Andersen report suggests. In the study, Andersen employees made 480 orders on 100 different e-commerce sites this month — and only 350 of those were completed. Web site crashes, buggy forms, and other problems familiar to Web surfers blocked transactions in the rest of the cases. If anything, the Andersen study problem *underestimates* the sales lost due to poor Web sites, since it doesn’t account for the times when would-be customers give up out of frustration, before the e-commerce site even has a site to crash.

Web bugs crash zip of online buying