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Performance Tracking  > 2011 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2011 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


This year saw yet another major rise in the online sales and the e-retailers can safely say that it was indeed one happy holiday season. Despite the lingering effect of the economic crisis, consumers felt a bit more comfortable opening up their wallets this year and the sales numbers clearly show it – a 16 percent increase in spending, year-over-year, to $2.8 billion, according to comScore.

“E-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices” confirms comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. While last year Cyber Monday was the only billion-dollar day, this year it was accompanied by 9 others. However, with spending over 1.25 billion it remains the heaviest online spending day of 2011 and thus tops the charts for a second consecutive year.

Of course, during this period we monitored closely the performance of 10 of the most popular shopping destinations and recorded their results. The Reports simulated a typical online purchase transaction, like selecting an item, adding it to the shopping cart and checkout, representative for the End Users' int eractions with a website. Measurements of the multi-step transactions were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different US cities.

As usual, the monitored retailers managed to cope with the Holiday traffic, but there were a few glitches which you can read about in our Report Highlights. Despite these minor issues, it is safe to say that all sites were accessible and delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction.

The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1overstock.com2.8441.8112.4982.384
2circuitcity.com2.7942.4192.1902.468
3compusa.com3.2512.6782.5372.822
4walmart.com3.3592.6502.5752.861
5bestbuy.com3.2733.1862.3782.946
6kmart.com3.4892.6862.6692.948
7radioshack.com5.9533.7943.2054.317
8toysrus.com7.3614.7002.5734.878
9qvc.com6.8885.0094.4575.451
10amazon.com8.6715.2214.6836.192

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1overstock.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2compusa.com99.994%100.000%100.000%99.998%
3circuitcity.com99.920%99.902%99.905%99.909%
4amazon.com99.816%99.918%99.920%99.885%
5kmart.com99.807%99.810%99.813%99.810%
6toysrus.com99.784%99.780%99.847%99.803%
7walmart.com99.727%99.838%99.802%99.789%
8radioshack.com99.745%99.812%99.801%99.786%
9bestbuy.com99.736%99.759%99.747%99.747%
10qvc.com99.700%99.773%99.717%99.730%

We wish you a Prosperous and Error-free New Year!

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO


Methodology:
Performance and availability are measured for a typical travel-related booking 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 buyers' experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from three locations of the WebSitePulse global monitoring network. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from four 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".