About Us
Services
Our clients
Press Room
Careers
Policies
Buttons
Performance Tracking
Blog
Performance Tracking  > 2013 Valentine's Day

WebSitePulse 2013 Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report Summary


With the day of love, and chocolate, and flowers safely behind us, it is time to take a look at the actual numbers for Valentine’s day sales. Whoever said that love don’t cost a thing got it wrong. The average American set aside about $130 for gifts for their loved ones this year. According to NRF’s survey, the vast majority of the consumers opted for candy (51.0%), followed by flowers (36.6%). Jewelry comes in third with a 19.7% of the sales.

The rise in the usage of mobile and tablet devices has lead to yet another increase in online shopping. More than one quarter (26.3%) made their purchases online. This is yet another sharp increase (up from 19.3% last year) which is a clear sign of the huge potential of the online sales. And to be able to realise this potential the sites of the biggest retailers must be, above all, up and running, preferably fast, at all times. But was it really like that this year?

Our traditional Performance Tracking Report shows that indeed in 2013 Valentine’s day shopping period we see an overall improvement in the uptime going from 99.62% to 99.89% for the whole group. In terms of response time we can notice a significant step ahead as well - from an average of 22.08 seconds last year to 15.31 seconds. This remarkable improvement surely leads to a better online shopping experience, which in turn will pave the way to another increase in online sales for the days to come.

To see a summary of our stats just take a look and the graphs and tables below or check the day-to-day results in the Daily Reports section.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. resp. time
1harryanddavid.com4.9967.7787.1386.637
2brookstone.com7.7836.4136.2976.831
3pagoda.com20.81413.07411.94315.277
41800flowers.com17.00414.65418.55416.737
5helzberg.com10.25517.03623.05416.782
6vermontteddybear.com31.11915.84316.14921.037
7ftd.com23.53820.86627.21623.873

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. uptime
1pagoda.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
21800flowers.com100.000%99.888%99.966%99.951%
3harryanddavid.com99.930%99.940%99.943%99.938%
4vermontteddybear.com99.848%99.973%99.885%99.902%
5helzberg.com99.985%99.720%99.955%99.887%
6brookstone.com99.717%99.566%99.649%99.644%
7ftd.com98.240%98.181%98.332%98.251%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2013 Valentine's Day Reports reflect a complete fullpage web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between February 1 and February 15, 2013. Performance and availability measurements are made for a typical multi-step fullpage 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".