Holiday Season Report 2015

Performance Tracking

2018 Holiday Season

2018 Hurricane Season

2018 Vacation Planning

2018 Mother's Day

2018 Tax Websites

2018 Valentine's Day

2017 Holiday Season

2017 Hurricane Season

2017 Vacation Planning

2017 Mother's Day

2017 Tax Websites

2017 Valentine's Day

2016 Holiday Season

2016 Hurricane Season

2016 Vacation Planning

2016 Mother's Day

2016 Tax Websites

2016 Valentine's Day

Reports Archive 2005-2015

Performance Tracking > 2015 Holiday Season Report

WebSitePulse 2015 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary

The holiday season and hype are over and we are back to report what we have promised – the performance and availability of 11 online shopping websites that we monitored for two months. FedEx predicted, "a record-breaking holiday season, forecasting shipments between Black Friday and Christmas Eve will jump about 12% from last year." "A record-breaking holiday season" for online retailers means sales coming from heavy traffic. Thus, they should have been well prepared to bear the heavy traffic load or else they could simply lose their visitors and customers in just seconds.

Heavy traffic load may affect both the availability (uptime) and performance (response time) of a website. So, if the website is slow or is simply down, visitors naturally leave it and look for competitors.

From the monitored websites, Kmart.com performed best as its response time was the lowest – only 1.102 seconds on average. Sears.com, Bestbuy.com and Qvc.com remained in the range of 1.1 to 1.9 seconds on average too. Hallmark.com, Walmart.com, Target.com and Amazon.com, however, were a bit slower – their average response time varied between 4.2 and 5.2 seconds.

As for the availability, Kmart.com, Hallmark.com and Bestbuy.com were 100% up the whole time.

Overall, all websites performed excellent considering that the monitoring period was two months. However, keep in mind that uptime and response time are so important for any business with an online presence that "If a site shaves a fraction of a second off its response, the rewarding result is a rocket lift in conversion rates for it". For detailed stats of the monitored targets, see the tables below.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	kmart.com	1.262	0.967	1.066	1.098
2	sears.com	1.437	0.998	1.093	1.176
3	bestbuy.com	2.161	1.857	1.759	1.926
4	qvc.com	2.314	1.809	1.832	1.985
5	tigerdirect.com	2.437	1.938	1.689	2.021
6	toysrus.com	1.761	2.284	2.367	2.137
7	jcpenney.com	3.665	2.931	3.450	3.349
8	hallmark.com	4.554	3.929	4.231	4.238
9	walmart.com	4.727	4.310	4.095	4.377
10	target.com	4.745	4.411	4.173	4.443
11	amazon.com	6.463	4.862	4.340	5.222

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	Los Angeles	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	hallmark.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	bestbuy.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	kmart.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	sears.com	100.000%	99.994%	100.000%	99.998%
5	jcpenney.com	99.996%	99.994%	99.996%	99.995%
6	toysrus.com	99.990%	99.988%	99.991%	99.990%
7	qvc.com	99.968%	99.977%	99.960%	99.968%
8	walmart.com	99.876%	99.886%	99.827%	99.863%
9	amazon.com	99.716%	99.693%	99.718%	99.709%
10	tigerdirect.com	99.197%	99.147%	99.157%	99.167%
11	target.com	98.689%	98.613%	98.668%	98.657%

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:

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".