Gomez, an e-commerce research and consulting firm, has laid off about 35 of its 152 employees to cope with a slowdown in business as the economy has cooled.

``It's a new environment with a new revenue picture,'' said Julio Gomez, co-founder and chief executive of the Waltham, Mass. ``The company can't grow as much in this environment as it did previously. . . . So we are cutting expenses.''

James Fox, Gomez's chief financial officer, said most of the cuts were in the research, sales and consulting operations focused on the retail, travel and health sectors of e-commerce. Gomez, which made a name for itself by ranking online brokers and financial services on the Web, had expanded aggressively into other e-commerce categories over the past 12 to 18 months. But now, Fox said, the firm is returning to its roots, concentrating mostly on financial services.

Despite the company's concentration on online commerce, Gomez maintains his firm had few dot-com clients and is not suffering because of the dot-com shakeout, according to a company press release.

Gomez was founded in May 1997 by Julio Gomez and John Robb, two Forrester Research analysts, and Alexander Stein, co-founder of FarSight Financial Services, an online brokerage firm sold to Merrill Lynch.

The firm makes money by directing shoppers who visit its Gomez.com Web site to other sites, by selling its e-commerce research and providing consulting services to corporate clients, and by tracking Web-site performance measurements -- like download times -- for clients.

The company has suffered some criticism from the press because it makes money from consulting services to corporate clients which may or may not receive higher rankings on the company's "scorecards," as a result.

Published: April 11, 2001

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