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February 21, 2007

Final results from the WebSitePulse Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report


The final results from WebSitePulse Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report show that even though most of the leading online retailers offered uninterrupted and reliable web services during the intense shopping period for Valentine's Day, some of them experienced serious availability and uptime problems.

The Top 3 performers with the fastest response times are Poetry.com, Godiva.com and Brookstone.com. The performer with the slowest response time was Hallmark.com

Only two retailers maintained 100% uptime of their online stores: Macys.com and Proflowers.com. Of the ten sites monitored, Hallmark.com came in at number 10 with 96% uptime.

Hallmark.com was unavailable for online customers several times. On February 1, 8, 12 and 14 the website had with availability problems for several hours each of these days and had very slow response time on February 14, when Valentine's Day shoppers, who missed the deadline for ordering a real gift rushed to Hallmark.com to order e-cards. Hallmark.com showed similar results last year for the 2006 Valentine's Day Performance Report.

Another major event was when Diamond.com was unavailable for shopping more than 6 hours on February 07. At 8:53 am the site went completely down and this status continued for more than 6 hours. The website was completely restored at 2:55 pm EST and the response times of the web transaction were back to their normal levels.