2008 Holiday Season Report Highlights

• December 1, 2008 BestBuy.com continues to be the worst performer in our Holiday Retail Performance Report The problems for BestBuy continue to be a highlight in our Holiday Retail Performance Report even after the Black Friday. The message "Online Ordering is Temporarily Unavailable" was on the site intermittently through most of the day instead of the customers' shopping cart content. The total downtime for the day was estimated to 30 minutes.
• November 28, 2008 Sears.com and Kmart.com websites closed for Black Friday online shoppers.
  
  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.
• November 26, 2008 BestBuy.com was the worst performer in our Holiday Retail Performance for 26th of November. The problems started at the morning with messages showing that the "Holiday Online Ordering is Temporarily Unavailable" and continued almost all day. The afternoon was marked with some "Check timed out" errors on the last page from our transaction, where the users are checking out their products. The checkout page timeout was more than a minute, which can be taken as a serious problem in the online retail industry.