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Performance Tracking  > 2014 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2014 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


The Holiday Season has just ended, and it has surely been a successful one for many retailers – both on and offline.

We believe that websites’ performance is tightly connected to their sales. Throughout the holidays, we have been monitoring 11 of the most popular online retailers, and more specifically – their uptime and response time. It’s clear that when any of these two metrics is not in the norm, visitors are likely to fail submitting purchases or simply leave that website and go to a competitor.

From our daily reports, we could conclude that all our targets performed great throughout the season. That means that they were well-prepared for heavy traffic load.

Amazon.com has demonstrated the highest uptime for the whole monitored period - 99.997%. As far as response time is concerned - Qvc.com has the lowest - 2.017 seconds.

To view day-to-day statistics on all targets, look below.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1qvc.com1.9622.4181.6722.017
2bestbuy.com2.0603.2152.0552.443
3tigerdirect.com2.4292.8472.1012.459
4kmart.com2.4673.4172.3942.759
5toysrus.com1.9403.6662.7132.773
6hallmark.com4.6372.8912.2403.256
7sears.com2.9553.5643.2913.270
8target.com4.2334.7703.8244.276
9amazon.com8.3346.0005.3246.553
10walmart.com6.8568.2367.2417.444
11jcpenney.com12.64313.06212.81812.841

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1amazon.com100.000%100.000%99.991%99.997%
2jcpenney.com99.995%99.995%99.995%99.995%
3sears.com99.987%99.995%99.967%99.983%
4kmart.com99.972%99.989%99.978%99.980%
5toysrus.com99.971%99.972%99.990%99.978%
6hallmark.com99.945%99.968%99.927%99.947%
7target.com99.961%99.963%99.899%99.941%
8qvc.com99.895%99.910%99.947%99.917%
9walmart.com99.871%99.860%99.832%99.854%
10tigerdirect.com99.705%99.673%99.686%99.688%
11bestbuy.com99.542%99.531%99.478%99.517%

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".