Performance Tracking > 2015 Valentine's Day > Introduction WebSitePulse 2015 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime ReportGood news for St. Valentine’s Shopping Fever for 2015! The online shopping outlook for St. Valentine’s Day this year looks quite promising, according to a survey conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics for the National Retail Federation (NRF). What could be more stimulating for online retailers to ensure their websites are up and running 24/7 during the Valentine’s shopping fever than a positive outlook? In the article “Building the business case for a unified commerce platform,” the NRF state that “retailers are rethinking their technology approach to better serve connected consumers.” Considering that the online shopping for Valentine’s will be blooming this year and that more retailers are making informed decisions to invest in technology, you practically have no excuse if your online store is not functioning properly. And, by “functioning properly” we mean the website’s response time and uptime are too high or too low respectively. Online shoppers come to your website to browse and purchase gifts for their beloved ones. This means if your website is slow or down during these first few seconds of their visit, you will lose their trust in no time hence their money. It’s quite effortless for users to go to a competitor whose website is working flawlessly and they can make that gift purchase immediately and hassle-free. Since we’ve been providing monitoring services enabling clients to increase the efficiency of their online transactions and decrease the loss of revenue for 15 years already, we find websites’ performance crusial, especially during heavy traffic flow. Therefore, we decided to monitor 7 of the most popular websites for gift purchasing during the Valentine’s fever – from January 31st until February 16th, 2015. We will be neatly reporting the details on their performance and availability on a daily basis throughout the whole period, just to see if they have foreseen possible traffic overflow. |