Holiday Season Report 2012

Performance Tracking

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Performance Tracking > 2012 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2012 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary

Had it not been for the fiscal cliff, it would have been a very happy holiday season indeed. Or so the experts say. In fact, although sales figures are still strong (and better than those in 2011), they still couldn’t live up to the expectations and fell about one billion dollars short. The good news is that online sales are soaring one more time as consumers are willing to shop online with even more confidence than ever before. Of course, the affordable and easy-to-manage technology allows more and more businesses to step onto the online stage thus driving the e-sales up even further.

In these highly competitive times, it is of particular importance for the owners to keep their sites running at all times. The logic is simple - downtime equals loss of revenue. The more downtime, the greater the loss. That is why we kept an eye on the best known online retailers to see how their websites functioned during the busy Holiday Season.

Here are some notable highlights:

Overstock.com lead both the uptime and response time tables showing near-perfect performance throughout the whole Holiday season.
The rest of the websites experienced the occasional connectivity hiccups and slowdowns which lasted around 10-15 minutes. Sears.com experiences a major slowdown on November 19th, 2012 which lasted until the early hours of the next day.
Walmart.com had major DNS issues starting December 26th that went on to 27th as well. This is the most notable outage for the whole group.

You can check the summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	overstock.com	1.386	1.536	2.149	1.690
2	target.com	2.777	2.029	1.823	2.209
3	toysrus.com	3.927	2.777	2.540	3.082
4	sears.com	4.320	2.957	2.220	3.165
5	qvc.com	4.811	3.516	2.760	3.696
6	kmart.com	5.222	2.819	3.399	3.813
7	walmart.com	5.624	4.012	3.452	4.362
8	bestbuy.com	6.404	4.105	3.132	4.547
9	tigerdirect.com	5.604	4.946	4.755	5.102
10	amazon.com	8.302	5.732	5.137	6.391

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	overstock.com	100.000%	99.996%	100.000%	99.999%
2	amazon.com	99.982%	99.987%	99.951%	99.973%
3	qvc.com	99.968%	99.651%	99.919%	99.846%
4	bestbuy.com	99.729%	99.726%	99.707%	99.721%
5	sears.com	99.650%	99.651%	99.646%	99.649%
6	toysrus.com	99.523%	99.522%	99.529%	99.524%
7	tigerdirect.com	99.420%	99.428%	99.423%	99.424%
8	kmart.com	99.177%	99.187%	99.144%	99.169%
9	walmart.com	98.075%	98.076%	97.926%	98.025%
10	target.com	97.161%	97.137%	97.132%	97.143%

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:

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