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Performance Tracking  > 2020 Holiday Season

WebSitePulse 2020 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


2020 was a challenging year for us all. It was significantly more problematic for all retail shops due to the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the Coronavirus led most of the holiday purchases to be made online, which helped the online business's growth overall. Now the Holiday season 2020 has ended, and so has our 2020 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For the 15th year in a row, WebSitePulse has 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 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 whole monitored period.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 3.126 sec, which was 0.655 seconds faster than last year. The daily average responses by locations are as follow: This year's winner for the fastest loading website is samsclub.com, with an average response time of 1.747 seconds, followed by bathandbodyworks.com (1.971 sec) and costco.com (2.197 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was amazon.com with 5.039 seconds average response time, which may have frustrated some potential customers and led to lower sales.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers' websites was good during the whole monitored period except for michaels.com and officedepot.com, which had some 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 2020 holiday season was 99.94%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow: For the 2nd year in a row, the winner is amazon.com, with 100% uptime for the whole monitored period, closely followed by belk.com (99.999%) and hallmark.com (99.998%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands samsclub.com with 99.732%, which means it was not accessible for around 3 hours during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1samsclub.com1.8621.8361.5351.744
2bathandbodyworks.com3.1841.4761.2401.967
3costco.com2.4862.1721.9452.201
4barnesandnoble.com2.5712.1261.9872.228
5michaels.com3.0822.2661.9092.419
6belk.com3.4102.1902.9972.865
7cdw.com4.4203.5493.3353.768
8hallmark.com3.9123.7434.6564.104
9officedepot.com5.3444.7174.7284.930
10amazon.com5.8864.8644.3515.033

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1amazon.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2belk.com100.000%99.996%100.000%99.999%
3hallmark.com100.000%100.000%99.994%99.998%
4barnesandnoble.com99.994%100.000%99.990%99.995%
5costco.com99.994%99.994%99.988%99.992%
6bathandbodyworks.com99.978%99.939%99.960%99.959%
7cdw.com99.973%99.959%99.928%99.953%
8michaels.com99.942%99.929%99.954%99.942%
9officedepot.com99.802%99.851%99.832%99.828%
10samsclub.com99.967%99.699%99.547%99.738%

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".