Web performance monitoring company AlertSite reports availability and response times of top online retail Web sites
COCONUT CREEK, Fla.—January 14, 2010—Online sales, totaling approximately $27 billion, was not the only positive outcome for online retailers in the 2009 holiday season. Overall, during the period beginning Nov. 26, Thanksgiving Day, and ending Dec. 31, online retailers showed strong Web performance. On average they reported 99.89 percent availability and 4.10-second response times. AlertSite®, the leading provider of Web performance management solutions, released the metrics today in its first E-Commerce Holiday Web Performance Index.
"None of the online retailers we were monitoring experienced significant site outages or response time slowdowns on their home pages this holiday season," says Ken Godskind, Chief Strategy Officer for AlertSite. "There were a few blips here and there—Lowe's, for example, experienced longer-than-usual response times on Dec. 7 due to site maintenance, and all sites took longer to load on Dec. 2 and Dec. 22—but across the board, online retailers performed well this season."
Seven retailers monitored by AlertSite—Walmart, Victoria's Secret, Target, Staples, QVC, Macy's, and Amazon—topped the charts with 100 percent Web site availability throughout the season. And the majority of sites, 73 percent, reported average response times well below the 5.1-second standard suggested by Aberdeen as the point at which business performance begins to decline.
According to comScore, online sales rose 5 percent this year during the November and December holiday shopping season. The two busiest online shopping days of the 2009 holiday season were, respectively, Tuesday, Dec. 15, with $913 million in sales, and Monday, Nov. 30, otherwise referred to as "Cyber Monday," with online sales totaling $887 million.
"As the Internet has increasingly become a critical component of business strategy and sales, retailers have come to recognize that they need to prepare and tend to their Web sites with the same care and attention they would their brick-and-mortar shops," adds Godskind. "As a result, major site outages and other crippling performance issues are much less common now than they were a few years ago, even on high traffic days such as those experienced during the holiday season."
AlertSite monitors and reports the Web performance of the leading companies in a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, and more, in a series of Market Indices. AlertSite obtains these metrics using DéjàClick, the company's inside-the-browser Web performance monitoring solution, to simulate typical customer interactions on a company's homepage, producing a real-world view of how long it takes to access the page, as well as the availability of the page. Home pages are evaluated at 15 minute intervals, from six geographic locations across the United States.
For more information on AlertSite's Market Index Methodology, please visit:
http://www.alertsite.com/solutions_marketindex_methodology.shtml.
ABOUT ALERTSITE
AlertSite is a leading provider of Web performance management solutions that ensure a customer's Web-based services and applications are always available and running at peak performance. More than 2,300 customers worldwide rely on AlertSite to understand and enhance the end-user Web experience, including AT&T, Honda, Ryder, Symantec and Purina Mills.
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