Hitwise, which offers rather detailed and expensive competitive intelligence on website traffic, has the worst online store I’ve encountered in recent memory. Purchasing an off-the-shelf report is a multi-step process, and each step takes over a minute (for no obvious reason).

First you enter the url of a website you want information on, then you wait a minute or more, then you decide what geographic market you want stats for, then you wait another minute or more. I’m not sure what is next, because I’ve never made it that far. I end up doing something else, and by the time I come back to the Hitwise store and try to complete the next step, it has timed out my session and I have to start all over again.

Appearantly it’s been this way for at least a couple of days. What bullshit.

Update: 12 hours later, and it’s still a delightful experience. Appearantly the server is half way around the world from me, in Australia, but this goes way beyond communications latency. Regular page views on their store are slow, but not managed-hosting-on-venus slow.

Update 2: A month later, and I decided to check back because I saw that someone from hitwise seems to have checked this post. It still sucks. It’s taking forever. I have no idea why.