Uptrends publishes the U.S. online stores Uptime report for 996 online stores in the United States. Wakefield – December, 02, 2013
U.S. online stores depend heavily upon the holiday season for the majority of their yearly sales. Over the past few years, Cyber Monday has been ranked as the heaviest online spending day during this period. In 2012, a stunning $1.46 Billion dollars was spent during Cyber Monday alone. Last year in the period from the 1st of November to the 31st of December, a total amount of $42.29 Billion dollars was spent online.
Black Friday Online Spending Hit Record $1.2 Billion
Every year the holiday season rush starts with Thanksgiving and Black Friday. For the U.S. online stores, this year’s Black Friday was even more successful than Black Friday in 2012. According to Comscore, a record $1.198 billion was spent online, which is an increase of 15% compared to last year ($1.042 billion).
With such potential revenue, the stakes were even higher for the U.S. online store competitors this year, with each one vying for a piece of this huge pie. Therefore, it was imperative that their online stores had maximum availability.
At Uptrends, we understand the importance of this matter and are committed to helping in optimizing the performance and availability of online stores during the peak holiday season. Based on the results of the study we conducted, we concluded that many online stores experienced significant amounts of time when their websites were not accessible during Black Friday.
During Black Friday, Uptrends monitored the home pages of 976 U.S. online stores. We conducted the test from over 100 checkpoints worldwide with a monitoring interval period of 5 minutes and checked their availability for visitors and (potential) customers.
Below are some of the key findings regarding the availability of the online stores monitored:
Key findings:
- 10.25% of the websites (100 out of 976) experienced accessibility problems during Black Friday
- 89.75% of the websites (876 out of 976) scored 100% uptime during Black Friday
- All websites combined were down for more than 300 hours
- The average availability of the entire group of online stores was 99.67%
The least available websites
Overview of the 25 online U.S. stores which showed the lowest availability during Black Friday 2013
| Probe | Uptime (%) | Down time (min) | Down time (hrs) |
| Bluebath | 51.00 | 706.3 | 11.77 |
| Theparkcatalog | 52.22 | 688.1 | 11.47 |
| Tigerdirect | 63.23 | 531 | 8.85 |
| Onlieshoes | 85.34 | 211.1 | 3.52 |
| Tractorsupply | 88.76 | 162 | 2.70 |
| Rugs-direct | 88.78 | 161.7 | 2.70 |
| Eharlequin | 91.17 | 127.2 | 2.12 |
| Solidsignal | 91.37 | 124.4 | 2.07 |
| Delias | 91.96 | 115.6 | 1.93 |
| Fingerhut | 91.97 | 115.4 | 1.92 |
| Instawares | 92.79 | 103.6 | 1.73 |
| Potpourrigift | 93.73 | 90.2 | 1.50 |
| Cabelas | 93.93 | 87.5 | 1.46 |
| Hamgo | 95.40 | 66.2 | 1.10 |
| Peapod | 95.54 | 64.2 | 1.07 |
| Delcity.net | 95.76 | 61.2 | 1.02 |
| Cheaperthandirt | 95.78 | 60.7 | 1.01 |
| 39dollarglasses | 95.88 | 59.4 | 0.99 |
| Microsoftstore | 96.25 | 53.9 | 0.90 |
| Modells | 96.68 | 47.8 | 0.80 |
| Teacollection | 97.13 | 41.2 | 0.69 |
| Shop.lego | 97.32 | 38.7 | 0.65 |
| 4wd | 97.38 | 37.6 | 0.63 |
| Babyearth | 97.62 | 34.3 | 0.57 |
| Audiocubes | 97.68 | 33.4 | 0.56 |
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“We consider 99.90% uptime to be the minimum required for online stores. If your online store is not available, the (potential) customer will do their shopping somewhere else which will result in loss of revenue and reputation of your company,” said Jim Jaworski, Director of North American Operations for Uptrends. By using Uptrends as your monitoring solution, you will be well informed about your websites’ performance and availability. And when it does unexpectedly experience issues, you’ll be alerted immediately so that you can put the proper resources in place and prevent website downtime throughout the rest of the holiday season”.
Methodology
Uptrends tested the availability of the front page of each website, at 5 minute intervals, using over 100 global checkpoints. If a website was not able to be reached, a second checkpoint from a different location performed another availability check. If the website was still not available, it was defined as an error. During the research period, only the availability of the front page was examined. Scheduled maintenance periods were not factored into these test results. For the period when a website was available, it was registered as uptime. During the period when errors were generated, it was registered as downtime.
About Uptrends Web performance monitoring
The mission of Uptrends.com is to increase availability of websites, servers and transactions and to reduce costly downtime for businesses and entrepreneurs that operate online. The Uptrends monitoring system, uses a network of more than 100 checkpoints from various countries around the world. More than 2,500 customers in 45 countries rely on Uptrends to keep them informed of their site, server and transaction performance, so that potential problems can be identified and downtime reduced as much as possible. Uptrends has offices in both the US and Europe.
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