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Performance Tracking  > 2014 Valentine's Day

WebSitePulse 2014 Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report Summary


Valentine’s Day is over and so is the monitoring of 7 of the most popular websites for purchasing gifts for the beloved ones.

We monitored these websites to see how they handled the heavy traffic load during the St. Valentine’s shopping fever – from January 31 until February 16th, 2014. As we have quoted prweb.com before, "consumers spoke loud and clear with their time and wallets in 2013, telling the market that gains by online retailers were no accident.” This means that online purchasing is becoming more popular regardless of occasions and merchandise.

Therefore, apart from the quality of the merchandise, the availability and performance of a website are the most important features a prospect client can look for. Retailers must remember that customers purchase online because it’s faster and easier. If a website does not load fast enough or is not available 24/7, it becomes completely worthless.

Performance

The performance of the websites is measured by 'response time’. The average response time during the monitoring period varied between 5.38 (harryanddavid.com) and 16.50 seconds (vermontteddybear.com). Our records show that the latter scored high delays in loading pages several times during the monitoring period, which brought its average response time up to 16 seconds. It is quite possible that while visitors were trying to select a gift and/purchase it, the specific page was not loading properly and failed to process the request, which could translate into revenue loss and irritated customers.

Availability

Availability, on the other hand, is measured by uptime which shows whether the website was up and running while visitors were browsing in it and processing transactions. This time, only one of the monitored targets scored 100% uptime, while the lowest uptime was 96.896%. The rest of the websites did very good indeed – 98 and 99% of uptime. Check out the detailed statistics of the monitored targets below.


Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. resp. time
1harryanddavid.com3.6937.4844.9715.382
2brookstone.com7.18211.2035.5697.985
31800flowers.com11.11510.9077.4399.820
4pagoda.com7.09311.64210.8539.863
5helzberg.com8.95312.2749.06010.096
6ftd.com15.84714.59812.86114.435
7vermontteddybear.com24.05711.62113.83516.505

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. uptime
1harryanddavid.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
21800flowers.com100.000%99.971%100.000%99.990%
3ftd.com100.000%100.000%99.925%99.975%
4helzberg.com99.949%99.969%99.986%99.968%
5brookstone.com99.679%99.638%99.672%99.663%
6vermontteddybear.com98.527%99.159%98.331%98.672%
7pagoda.com96.857%96.928%96.902%96.896%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2014 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 January 31 1 and February 16, 2014. 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".