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Performance Tracking  > 2022 Holiday Season

WebSitePulse 2022 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


As a post-pandemic, 2022 was a busy year, ending with a very successful Holiday Season. NRF predicted a 6%-8% increase in holiday sales over the same period in 2021 to $960 billion. It was a good time for e-commerce as well. Online sales were predicted to 10%-12% increase to $267.6 billion.

After monitoring ten online retailers and analyzing the data, we at WebSitePulse published our "2022 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report". It is an annual report where for the 16th year in a row, we have monitored the leading US online retailers measuring and evaluating their availability and speed during that busy time of the year.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages and a complete web transaction like an end-user would interact with the website.

The report measures both the 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), Los Angeles, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The monitored online retailers' websites' overall speed was good, except for a few fluctuations during the monitored period.

On December 7, OfficeDepot.com experienced some availability issues, and cdw.com had an "add to cart" problem for about 15 minutes. Later, on December 23rd, cdw.com experienced issues returning 502 - Bad Gateway error. Barnesandnoble.com had significant problems on December 26th. It has been timing out and returning incomplete content for about 3 hours.

After the holidays, officedepot.com was undergoing routine maintenance on January 5th.

For more information, check the report highlights. We found that the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 4.897 sec, 1.95 seconds slower than last year. The daily average responses by locations are as follow: This year's winner for the fastest loading website is belk.com, with an average response time of 2.037 seconds, followed by barnesandnoble.com (2.481 sec) and rileyhome.com (2.855 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table again was costco.com, with a 12.564 seconds average response time, which may have frustrated some potential customers and led to lower sales.

Compared to the last year's performance, the three leaders decreased their response time by an average of 0.61 seconds, and the slowest site this year performed an average of e 7.163 seconds slower than in the 2021 Holiday Season monitored period.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers' websites was satisfactory during the whole monitored period except for some minor downtime during the monitored time. For more information, check the report highlights.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for the 2022 holiday season was 99.92%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows: We have three winners for this year's holiday season whose websites were available with no interruptions: rileyhome.com, gobros.com, and hallmark.com. At the bottom of the availability chart stands officedepot.com with 99.524%, which means it was not accessible for around 5 hours and 20 minutes during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1belk.com2.4752.0881.5472.037
2barnesandnoble.com2.4442.7822.2182.481
3rileyhome.com3.5073.0502.0072.855
4michaels.com3.2553.3862.6663.102
5hallmark.com3.7514.3333.6823.922
6gobros.com4.4224.3433.5074.091
7cdw.com4.8375.0394.5304.802
8amazon.com6.7887.1065.4596.451
9officedepot.com6.8976.8686.2456.670
10costco.com12.48012.95012.26312.564

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1rileyhome.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2hallmark.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
3gobros.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
4costco.com100.000%100.000%99.998%99.999%
5amazon.com99.988%100.000%100.000%99.996%
6belk.com99.987%100.000%99.995%99.994%
7michaels.com99.987%99.966%99.998%99.984%
8cdw.com99.926%99.901%99.924%99.917%
9barnesandnoble.com99.750%99.742%99.725%99.739%
10officedepot.com99.529%99.515%99.529%99.524%

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:

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".