2007 Mother's Day Report Highlights

• May 13, 2007 Hallmark.com with website availability issues again: Hallmark.com was the only website part of this report, which experienced website availability problems on Mother's Day. Higher than usual website response times were detected through the whole day, while sometimes the website did not respond at all or returned "500 Internal Server Error".
• May 12, 2007 Hallmark.com experiences website availability problems the last day before Mother's Day: Two website downtime periods were detected during the day. Early morning between 1:25 and 1:45am, a period with extremely high response times was detected and after that at 6pm, an uncommon message "error 500" was displayed, instead of the product description which our simulated transaction is attempting to purchase. One hour later the WebSitePulse engineers made some modifications to the recorded transaction and replaced the selected product with another one, which worked fine.
• May 11, 2007 Hallmark.com had again very serious website availability issues: We detected two downtime periods - the first one from 1:20am until 2:15am which did not have a big impact on Hallmark online visitors, and the second one from 10:30am up until 1:15pm which was right at the busy part of the day for last minute Mother's day shoppers. During these downtime periods the Hallmark website was not accessible, returning "Internal server error", "Page not found" or not responding at all, timing out on all tests.
• May 9, 2007 Hallmark.com experiences severe availability problems again: Starting at 8:30 in the morning and during the whole day, up until 7:15pm, the Hallmark website was not accessible most of the time, returning either "Service Unavailable" errors or not responding at all. During the short periods of time when the online transaction was successfully completed we recorded very high response times. We believe Hallmark.com struggled with capacity again, not being able to service all online customer requests.
• May 8, 2007 Hallmark.com experiences serious availability problems: Multiple timeouts and "404 Page Not Found" errors were detected at the "product display" and "add to cart" steps of the monitored transaction, simulating online shopper interaction, through the whole afternoon. There were brief periods of normal operation, but the majority of the time the web site was on error, which makes WebSitePulse experts to believe that the main reason for the detected problems was high traffic to the website. The normal operation of the website was restored at 7pm EST.
• May 8, 2007 Report Update: Today an email from 1800FLOWERS.COM was received requesting that they should be excluded from the WebSitePulse 2007 Mother's Day Retail Report. For this reason we will be monitoring only 6 websites for their performance and uptime during the busy Mother's shopping period. No particular reason was provided by 1800FLOWERS.COM for their request and we hope that their website will serve last minute online shoppers without any unexpected problems. This is the second time 1800FLOWERS.COM decides to be excluded from our reports. The first request was related to the 2007 Valentine's Day Retail Report.