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November 28, 2008

Are Sears.com and Kmart.com “Black Friday-ready”?



Sears.com Outage
This year, Shop.org is predicting that more than half of U.S. office workers with Web access will be shopping from their desks. But they will have no luck with Sears.com and Kmart.com.

The websites of Sears.com and Kmart.com are closed for online shoppers more than 50% of the time for Sears.com and 20% of the time for Kmart.com as of 12pm on Black Friday. The websites display a message on the home pages explaining that they are "temporarily experiencing high traffic volume". The problems started around 9:40am EST and continue as we post this anouncement.

Kmart.com Outage


BestBuy.com also experiences some problems with their checkout process. Again, more than 50% of our test transactions which are performed every 15 minutes from 3 US cities fail at checkout.

We will continue to closely monitor their perfomance and post updates as the day progresses.

Update: Sears.com ended the day a lot better than last year with only 3 hours and 48 minutes of downtime vs. 7 hours and 30 minutes in 2007. Kmart.com either received extra capacity or the online shoppers abandoned the website, because it performed much better after 12pm with total downtime for the day of 35 minutes. BestBuy.com continued to have issues with their checkout process for the rest of the day, with resulted in 18.5% failure rate of our transactional tests.