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Performance Tracking  > 2015 Valentine's Day

WebSitePulse 2015 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report


Good 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.

Daily Report for February 16, 2015See report for:


WebSitePulse reports the following results from web performance measurement of the websites participating in the the Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report:

The daily Average Response time from all monitored websites was 12.519 sec.

The Average Response time as measured from the US East Coast (Washington DC) was: 10.972 sec.
The Average Response time as measured from the US West Coast (San Francisco, CA) was:16.463 sec.
The Average Response time as measured from the US Central was (Chicago, IL):10.121 sec.

The Best Response time measured from US East Coast (Washington DC):6.556 sec.
The Best Response time measured from US West Coast (San Francisco, CA):7.424 sec.
The Best Response time measured from US Central was (Chicago, IL):5.666 sec.

The typical shopping transaction took the least time for harryanddavid.com visitors - 6.641 sec., while the visitors of ftd.com had to be the most patient, as the shopping transaction there took in average of 18.250 sec.
Four of the monitored websites delivered above-the-average response times for their transactions, while three of them demonstrated below-the-average daily performance.

The daily average uptime for the entire Group was 99.88%.

The Average Uptime as measured from the US East Coast (Washington DC) was:99.97%
The Average Uptime as measured from the US West Coast (San Francisco, CA) was:99.86%
The Average Uptime as measured from the US Central (Chicago, IL):99.82%

Five websites were available with no interruptions - 100%.
Six websites' availability was above the average, while one site dragged the average down with below-the-average availability.

Report Highlights

No events of particular importance or possible negative impact on the online visitors' interaction with the Websites included into the 2015 Valentine's day report were detected during the reported period, and according to WebSitePulse, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction.

Please, scroll down for Detailed Reports and Charts provided by WebSitePulse:

Daily Response Times
Legend:
    brookstone     ftd     vermonteddybear     1800flowers     helzberg 
    pagoda     harryanddavid 

Average Response Times for February 16, 2015
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1harryanddavid.com7.4245.6666.8346.641
2brookstone.com11.8256.0086.5568.130
3helzberg.com11.1697.9779.3769.507
4pagoda.com9.65913.56715.10412.777
51800flowers.com18.96912.13114.14215.081
6vermonteddybear.com30.78511.6679.28617.246
7ftd.com25.41313.83215.50518.250

Average Response Times February 01, 2015 - February 16, 2015
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1harryanddavid.com7.4249.1766.0297.543
2helzberg.com9.39510.5847.4259.135
3brookstone.com12.30915.6105.89911.272
4pagoda.com10.54116.83616.17914.519
51800flowers.com15.98619.3948.68114.687
6vermonteddybear.com27.5669.84910.95216.122
7ftd.com26.53136.66314.12125.772



Hourly Average Response Times
Select individual website to display:


Legend:
    individual site response times     monitored group average response times 


Average response times by hour for February 16, 2015
TargetHours
000102030405060708091011121314151617181920212223
1800flowers10.008.688.679.539.739.489.8812.3915.8016.2516.8917.3618.5317.9818.6018.3418.2419.2117.6418.8618.9618.6116.6215.69
brookstone6.725.796.728.347.488.498.197.769.147.919.038.418.818.648.439.538.858.719.418.718.667.486.637.27
ftd7.546.9310.628.818.608.328.6820.2722.1422.1621.9322.4122.1822.6923.0622.9122.1323.6323.6922.7123.2624.1319.1120.10
harryanddavid6.106.985.706.107.686.717.676.375.986.176.446.606.757.106.316.816.316.758.297.406.986.335.646.21
helzberg9.108.738.868.889.098.829.069.6211.508.717.817.2810.589.718.449.289.549.439.269.8410.1810.279.9214.29
pagoda12.8112.9511.9711.8111.5011.1717.1613.4513.7713.6912.5713.3813.2911.6912.3512.0012.4312.1112.8512.2312.3814.3013.0511.74
vermonteddybear15.9617.9628.5614.7716.8616.2319.6614.7014.4614.8631.7925.5616.7515.7215.4615.5913.6814.7114.5614.4214.7214.9715.0416.93


Average response times by hour February 01, 2015 - February 16, 2015
TargetHours
000102030405060708091011121314151617181920212223
1800flowers14.0314.2214.3114.5414.7814.9116.4014.9315.0214.9715.6015.3115.6715.3514.9914.2214.1713.8513.6113.8914.1614.6314.7514.16
brookstone11.0410.7910.9011.5010.9110.9211.4711.3511.7911.6111.2611.4011.6111.8311.4611.6411.5311.1910.8711.3010.8111.0511.3910.94
ftd25.0625.2025.0524.8924.5124.3527.4725.7025.9226.2826.4227.1626.7626.1625.7926.1226.3125.8225.6026.0325.4425.9125.6024.97
harryanddavid7.407.277.688.418.377.927.267.207.157.447.447.297.487.357.567.447.777.187.377.747.747.597.647.34
helzberg9.609.208.728.558.478.759.369.159.368.538.418.348.528.898.939.029.449.059.219.449.569.7910.8910.04
pagoda13.2513.4013.1313.7014.5415.7619.4417.4916.8414.6814.1114.8114.1514.8016.5414.5113.4313.3013.4013.3313.4013.4613.6113.34
vermonteddybear15.8515.1313.8515.4119.7614.6618.9716.4816.3614.4115.8118.3020.2614.8515.2416.1919.4318.3814.4316.6813.6513.5915.2114.03


Uptime

Uptime February 16, 2015
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1helzberg.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2pagoda.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
3brookstone.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
41800flowers.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
5ftd.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
6harryanddavid.com100.000%99.790%100.000%99.930%
7vermonteddybear.com99.050%98.970%99.770%99.263%

Uptime February 01, 2015 - February 16, 2015
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1ftd.com99.951%100.000%100.000%99.984%
2brookstone.com99.989%99.944%99.987%99.973%
3helzberg.com99.866%99.831%99.888%99.861%
4harryanddavid.com99.684%99.718%99.761%99.721%
51800flowers.com99.526%99.586%99.588%99.566%
6pagoda.com99.921%99.633%98.851%99.469%
7vermonteddybear.com98.961%99.611%99.432%99.335%

Methodology:
The 2015 Valentine's Day Reports reflect a complete fullpage web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between January 02 and February 16, 2015. Performance and availability measurements are made for a typical multi-step 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 shopper experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from 3 US-based locations of the WebSitePulse monitoring network: San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Washington, DC. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from 3 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".