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Performance Tracking  > 2017 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2017 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


Holiday season 2017 has already ended and it has surely been a successful one for many online retailers since the average U.S. consumer was expected to spend an average of $1,226 during the holiday shopping season (according deloitte.com).

For twelfth consecutive year WebSitePulse monitored nine of the leading online retailers during the most active shopping period of the year and compiled the WebSitePulse 2017 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end user would interact with the website.

The report measures both Uptime and Response Time of the websites as well as measurements of the multi-step online transactions which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), Los Angeles, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall uptime and speed of the monitored online retailers’ websites were quite good during the whole monitored period. We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 3.565 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.609 sec
  • Los Angeles, CA (US West Coast) – 4.039 sec
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 3.601 sec

This year for a second time in a raw target.com was the speed leader among the 9 monitored websites with an average response time of 1.194 seconds, followed by qvc.com (2.060 sec) and tigerdirect.com (2.810 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was hallmark.com with 6.499 seconds average response time which may have frustrated some of its visitors and led to lower sales.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 9 websites for 2017 holiday season was 99.81%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.82%
  • Los Angeles, CA (US West Coast) – 99.83%
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.82%

The winner with 99.998% average uptime for this year’s holiday season is toysrus.com, followed by tigerdirect.com (99.994%) and hallmark.com (99.992%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands target.com with 99.193% which mean it was not accessible for almost 9 hours during the whole monitored period.

The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1target.com1.5810.9601.0401.194
2qvc.com2.6471.8541.6802.060
3tigerdirect.com3.0151.9773.4392.810
4staples.com3.6313.2223.2053.353
5officedepot.com3.9543.3783.2293.521
6toysrus.com4.1183.2953.2043.539
7cdw.com4.9543.6204.1394.238
8amazon.com4.8924.3674.7784.679
9walmart.com5.3414.3764.7204.812
10hallmark.com7.0814.6087.8076.499

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1cdw.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2toysrus.com100.000%100.000%99.994%99.998%
3tigerdirect.com100.000%99.987%99.995%99.994%
4hallmark.com99.987%99.994%99.994%99.992%
5qvc.com99.965%99.936%99.957%99.953%
6walmart.com99.991%99.989%99.828%99.936%
7staples.com99.942%99.897%99.955%99.931%
8officedepot.com99.429%99.417%99.422%99.423%
9target.com99.187%99.201%99.192%99.193%
10amazon.com94.590%99.510%100.000%98.033%

We wish you a Prosperous and Error-free New Year!

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".