14th of February has passed, and so has the hype over the holiday of The St. Valentine’s Day. There is no doubt it was a successful holiday for the whole US economy since this year’s shopped spent $20.7 billion in the US alone.

The top 5 Valentine's Day Purchases were Candy (52%), greeting cards (44%), evening out (34%), flowers (35%) and jewelry (18%). Even though only 27% of the sales were made online, the best online retailers earned a good amount of money — nearly $5.6 billion. For the twelfth year in a raw WebSitePulse monitored seven of the leading gift shopping websites during the St. Valentine’s Day fever, and compiled the WebSitePulse 2019 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites home pages as well as 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), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central). The overall uptime and speed of the monitored online retailers’ websites were quite good during the whole monitored period. We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 2.987 sec. which is 1.665 sec faster than last year’s. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.849 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.265 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 2.820 sec

This year helzberg.com was the speed leader among the seven monitored gift shopping websites with an average response time of 1.545 seconds, followed by pagoda.com (1.891 sec) and brookstone.com (2.023 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table once again was ftd.com with 4.908 seconds average response time which surely frustrated many of its visitors and led to fewer sales.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 7 websites for 2019 St. Valentine’s Day was 99.95%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.95%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.94%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.96%

Once again, this year we have three winners with uninterrupted availability (100% uptime): 1800flowers.com, helzberg.com, and harryanddavid.com followed by brookstone.com (99.996%) and pagoda.com (99.917%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands vermonteddybear.com with 99.852% which means it was not accessible for only a bit more than half an hour during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	pagoda.com	1.594	1.400	1.497
2	helzberg.com	1.537	1.589	1.563
3	brookstone.com	2.041	1.721	1.881
4	harryanddavid.com	2.637	2.742	2.690
5	1800flowers.com	3.155	3.171	3.163
6	vermonteddybear.com	3.864	4.136	4.000
7	ftd.com	4.909	5.184	5.047

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	helzberg.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	1800flowers.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	harryanddavid.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	brookstone.com	100.000%	99.987%	99.993%
5	pagoda.com	99.949%	99.908%	99.929%
6	ftd.com	99.891%	99.878%	99.884%
7	vermonteddybear.com	99.855%	99.859%	99.857%