St. Valentine Day is now over, and so is WebSitePulse 2020 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report. All the major online retailers had a lot of traffic after all $22.4 billion were expected to be spent online on that holiday.

The top 5 Valentine's Day Purchases were Candy (52%), greeting cards (43%), evening out (34%), flowers (37%), and jewelry (21%).

The least popular gifts were clothing (20%) and gift cards (19%).

For the 13th year in a raw WebSitePulse monitored seven of the leading gift shopping websites during the St. Valentine’s Day fever, and compiled the WebSitePulse 2020 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end-user would interact with the website. The report measures both Uptime and Response Time of the websites as well as measurements of the multi-step online transactions which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall speed of the monitored online retailers’ websites was quite good during the whole monitored period.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 3.633 sec. which is 0.646 sec slower than last year’s. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.355 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.971 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 3.573 sec

This year pagoda.com was the speed leader among the seven monitored gift shopping websites with an average response time of 1.911 seconds, followed by 1800flowers.com (2.328 sec) and brookstone.com (2.401 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table once again was vermonteddybear.com with 8.568 seconds average response time, which surely frustrated many of its visitors and led to a revenue loss.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers’ websites was quite good during the whole monitored period, except for some outages of two of the stores on the 13 th and the 14 th of February. The daily average uptime for the entire group of 7 websites for 2020 St. Valentine’s Day was 98.95%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.84%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.88%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.84%

All the stores this year were 100% online for the whole monitored period, except for 1800flowers.com — 98.644% and harryanddavid.com — 93.326% uptime. The last one was not accessible for around 8 hours during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	pagoda.com	2.275	1.819	1.662	1.918
2	brookstone.com	2.598	2.374	2.095	2.356
3	1800flowers.com	2.150	2.564	2.592	2.435
4	ftd.com	2.838	2.287	2.315	2.480
5	helzberg.com	3.988	3.352	3.028	3.456
6	harryanddavid.com	4.469	4.677	3.934	4.360
7	vermonteddybear.com	9.477	7.984	7.803	8.421

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	brookstone.com	100.000%	98.208%	98.143%	98.784%
2	ftd.com	100.000%	98.117%	98.122%	98.746%
3	helzberg.com	100.000%	98.085%	98.037%	98.707%
4	pagoda.com	100.000%	97.963%	97.955%	98.639%
5	1800flowers.com	98.708%	98.580%	98.617%	98.635%
6	vermonteddybear.com	100.000%	97.892%	97.845%	98.579%
7	harryanddavid.com	93.418%	94.413%	94.387%	94.073%