Holiday Season Report 2016

Performance Tracking

2018 Holiday Season

2018 Hurricane Season

2018 Vacation Planning

2018 Mother's Day

2018 Tax Websites

2018 Valentine's Day

2017 Holiday Season

2017 Hurricane Season

2017 Vacation Planning

2017 Mother's Day

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2017 Valentine's Day

2016 Holiday Season

2016 Hurricane Season

2016 Vacation Planning

2016 Mother's Day

2016 Tax Websites

2016 Valentine's Day

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Performance Tracking > 2016 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2016 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary

For eleventh consecutive year WebSitePulse monitored eleven of the leading online retailers during the most active shopping period of the year - the 2016 Holiday Season. 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: Target.com. The consistent performance of its online shopping transaction simulating end-user experience resulted in 100% uptime from our Chicago and Washington, DC monitoring location. It was the Los Angeles monitoring node which spoiled the perfect score, resulting in a total of 99.998% uptime for the November 21, 2016 - January 04, 2017 period.
Number two in our top performers list was tigerdirect.com com following close behind with only a couple of isolated timeouts, which we detected.

The best in average response time category: From the monitored websites, Kmart.com performed best as its response time was the lowest – only 1.076 seconds on average. Sears.com, Target.com and Qvc.com remained in the range of 1.1 to 1.9 seconds on average too. Bestbuy.com, Walmart.com, Amazon.com and Hallmark.com, however, were a bit slower – their average response time varied between 3.6 and 5.5 seconds.

So who did the worst? : Overall, all monitored websites performed excellent considering that the monitoring period was two months. No events of particular importance or possible negative impact on the online visitors' interaction with the Websites included into the 2016 Holiday Season report were detected during the reported period, and according to WebSitePulse, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction.

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	kmart.com	1.133	1.137	0.957	1.076
2	sears.com	1.490	1.152	0.937	1.193
3	target.com	1.327	1.264	1.096	1.229
4	qvc.com	2.250	1.788	1.623	1.887
5	tigerdirect.com	2.265	1.911	2.443	2.206
6	jcpenney.com	2.777	2.444	2.378	2.533
7	toysrus.com	2.225	2.855	2.938	2.673
8	bestbuy.com	3.498	3.748	3.528	3.591
9	walmart.com	5.362	4.378	4.615	4.785
10	amazon.com	6.939	4.342	3.727	5.002
11	hallmark.com	6.132	4.492	5.785	5.470

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	target.com	99.995%	100.000%	100.000%	99.998%
2	tigerdirect.com	99.995%	99.995%	100.000%	99.997%
3	toysrus.com	99.990%	99.995%	100.000%	99.995%
4	jcpenney.com	100.000%	99.989%	99.996%	99.995%
5	hallmark.com	99.986%	99.995%	99.989%	99.990%
6	bestbuy.com	99.996%	99.979%	99.991%	99.988%
7	sears.com	99.976%	99.984%	99.976%	99.979%
8	qvc.com	99.980%	99.972%	99.980%	99.977%
9	kmart.com	99.979%	99.976%	99.961%	99.972%
10	amazon.com	99.716%	99.734%	99.754%	99.735%
11	walmart.com	99.907%	99.276%	99.164%	99.449%

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".