Holiday Season Report 2009

Performance Tracking

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Performance Tracking > 2009 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2009 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary

The Holiday Season is the most active shopping period of the year and this year, for a fifth time, WebSitePulse monitored the performance of ten of the top online retailers. The results are summarized below. Here is a summary of the performance and uptime results we recorded during this period of time:

The top Uptime performer: Overstock.com. The consistent performance of its online shopping transaction simulating end-user experience resulted in 100% uptime from all locations. Amazon.com followed close behind with only a couple of isolated timeouts, which we detected.

Circuitcity.com and Kmart.com did not perform as well. For Kmart the problems occured mostly around Thanksgiving. However, erratic timeouts were detected for their transactions almost every day. The holiday load also proved to be a challenge for Circuitcity.com as timeout warnings and errors at checkout were a daily occurrence.

Overstock.com have also shown the best response times. They top the list with 1.761sec average response time. At the bottom of the table we find Amazon.com with just 6.746 sec. These results indicate that the bar is set very high and a response time of around 3 seconds is already a must for all big online retailers.

Compared to last year's statistics, BestBuy.com shows the biggest improvement. Their uptime has increased from 97.197% in the 2008 Holiday Season to 99.969%. Their progress is most notable in the response time area where we can see that the average response time has been reduced to 3.172 sec. compared to 14.178 sec. in 2008.

You can find a concise list of the serious incidents detected here. The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	overstock.com	1.412	1.675	2.197	1.761
2	circuitcity.com	2.970	2.857	2.163	2.663
3	radioshack.com	4.548	2.444	1.379	2.790
4	toysrus.com	5.335	2.657	1.283	3.092
5	compusa.com	3.559	3.359	2.401	3.106
6	bestbuy.com	3.951	2.762	2.804	3.172
7	walmart.com	3.781	3.586	3.719	3.695
8	kmart.com	4.373	3.458	3.289	3.707
9	qvc.com	5.613	4.540	3.838	4.664
10	amazon.com	7.981	6.483	5.773	6.746

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	overstock.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	amazon.com	99.954%	99.994%	99.995%	99.981%
3	compusa.com	99.982%	99.965%	99.987%	99.978%
4	bestbuy.com	99.978%	99.964%	99.966%	99.969%
5	radioshack.com	99.881%	99.862%	99.830%	99.857%
6	walmart.com	99.787%	99.877%	99.857%	99.840%
7	qvc.com	99.454%	99.402%	99.456%	99.438%
8	toysrus.com	99.378%	99.378%	99.375%	99.377%
9	kmart.com	99.312%	99.244%	99.253%	99.270%
10	circuitcity.com	99.263%	99.191%	99.252%	99.235%

We wish you a Prosperous and Error-free New Year! And remember to take IT Easy!

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
Performance and availability are measured for a typical travel-related booking web transaction at 15 minute monitoring interval, every day, 24/7. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports.
The steps in each transaction are comparable for all websites, and reflect the real online buyers' experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from three locations of the WebSitePulse global monitoring network. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from four independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring -, which automatically switches to a 3 minute monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:

Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of specific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to some special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

WebSitePulse should be referred as the "Source" of the information;
WebSitePulse should be acknowledged as the owner of the copyrights of the information in the Reports;
The texts of the Reports could be changed or altered to better suit the needs and the style of the publisher without prior notice to WebSitePulse. However, the integrity and the meaning of the information should be preserved;

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".