2007 Valentine's Day Report Highlights

• February 12, 2007 Hallmark.com website down again: Valentine's Day shoppers, who missed the deadline for ordering a real gift and receiving it on time, rushed to Hallmark.com to order e-cards. This resulted in Hallmark.com being down three times for the day - during the night, at around 11 am and just after lunch, totaling in close to an hour of downtime for the day.
• February 08, 2007 Hallmark.com and Vermonteddybear.com experience downtime: Hallmark.com website was completely unavailable for the whole night. All checks returned error 404, which is not the nicest way to tell Customers to "come back later". In addition to this availability issue, once the website was back up again, the response was very high, which lead to poor website performance results. For a short period of time, Vermonteddybear.com website was redirecting all traffic to their yahoo store, interrupting the shopping transaction at this time.
• February 07, 2007 Diamond.com unavailable for shopping more than 6 hours: The Diamond.com website went down at 8:53 am EST on February 07th. It started to time out on most probes at the home page, which is the first page of the shopping transaction we simulate. The failure was as a result of very heavy load to the Diamond.com website which could not be handled by their web system. The problem started even earlier, at around 08:30, when the response times of the probes began to climb up. The website service was completely restored at 2:55 pm EST and the response times of the web transaction we measure were back to their normal levels. For more information, please click here.
• Feb 2, 2007 Report Update: As we indicated yesterday, on Feb 1 we monitored only nine online stores, because 1-800-FLOWERS.COM requested to be excluded from the report. In order to stay close to our methodology and to the number 10, we opened up the list with the Top Retailers and picked up the next most visited online destination, which happened to be MACYS.COM. We will include their website as a replacement for the "1-800-FLOWERS" in the Website Performance and Uptime report for 2007.
• Feb 1, 2007 Report Update: Representatives of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM requested today to be excluded from the 2007 Valentine's Day report, and for this reason we will present the website performance and website uptime results for only 9 online stores for Feb 1. No particular reason was provided by 1-800-FLOWERS.COM for their request. We hope their web site is ready to service all purchase inquiries of the Valentine's Day online shoppers and that we did not scare them that we will bring their web system down with only several simulated real-user requests to their website every hour. We wish 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and their staff good luck through this shopping period.