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Performance Tracking  > 2010 Valentine's Day

WebSitePulse 2010 Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report Summary


Now that Valentine's day is behind us, it is time to sum up the performance results of the ten monitored online shopping destinations.

The period was marked by two major outages for Macys.com and Poetry.com.

Macys.com's problems started after 8 P.M. on February 10 and the site's performance contunued to be erratic until the early hours of the next day. However, Poetry.com had even bigger problems on February 11 when the site was unavailable for over 8 hours, marking the biggest downtime for the whole monitoring campaign.

On the bright side, we noticed a significant improvement in the average response times for all monitored sites. The response times have decreased with about 1.2 seconds on average compared to previous years. This year's top performer is hallmark.com with a response time of 0.899 and Victoriassecret.com come next with 1.344. Unexpectedly, diamond.com are at the bottom of the table with an average of 4.876 sec.

In the uptime results section the first place is shared among Victoriassecret.com, Brookstone.com and Ftd.com, all of which showed a consistent performance and a staggering 100% availability throughout the whole period. Poetry.com's outage proved to be crucial for their overall statistics and they occupy the last place in the table with an uptime of 97.677%.

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

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. resp. time
1hallmark.com1.2270.7180.7530.899
2victoriassecret.com1.7801.1921.0601.344
3godiva.com2.7440.5581.4441.582
4macys.com2.2471.9181.0391.734
5poetry.com2.4001.6271.4681.832
6brookstone.com3.0790.8061.6331.839
7vermontteddybear.com4.0662.0501.3582.492
8ftd.com4.1792.1451.5832.636
9proflowers.com2.5753.9684.1903.578
10diamond.com4.2865.0855.2574.876

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. uptime
1victoriassecret.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2brookstone.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
3ftd.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
4hallmark.com99.972%100.000%100.000%99.991%
5godiva.com100.000%99.971%100.000%99.990%
6proflowers.com99.944%100.000%99.955%99.966%
7vermontteddybear.com99.971%99.972%99.954%99.966%
8diamond.com99.631%99.727%99.858%99.739%
9macys.com99.521%99.478%99.559%99.520%
10poetry.com97.683%97.691%97.657%97.677%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2010 Valentine's Day Reports reflect a complete web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between February 1 and February 14, 2010. Performance and availability measurements are made for a typical multi-step 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 shopper experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from 3 US-based locations of the WebSitePulse monitoring network: San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Washington, DC. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from 3 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".