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Performance Tracking  > 2014 Holiday Season  > Introduction

WebSitePulse 2014 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report


The Holiday Season is just around the corner, and it’s truly the best time of the year for both consumers and retailers.

According to Adobe, this year consumers would prefer to prolong the season instead of rushing out to buy gifts at the last minute. Extending the holiday, however, would have great benefits for retailers as well.

The National Retail Federation announced they expect a 4.1% growth in sales in November and December, estimating the total spending to $616.9 billion this year. And, the retailers who have decided to stretch out Black Friday deals throughout the whole November have a major contribution to that. Considering the above, online retailers must be well prepared to meet up the consumers’ needs as well. This means they not only have to have a huge variety of items displayed on their websites, but to also make sure their websites are able to bear heavy traffic load during the Holiday season. This is necessary to ensure a flawless shopping experience for their clients. In case the website freezes or slows down, the customers are likely to go to a competitor. Thus, the online retailer will not be able to gain the full benefits of the extended Holiday season.

Therefore, we have chosen 12 of the most popular online shopping websites and will monitor them throughout the whole Holiday season. We will be watching their websites’ availability and performance (uptime and response time) and will be reporting the results every day. At the end of the season we will see whether any of the monitored sites have experienced any downtime, when and why.