Report Reveals Serious Website Problems for Some of the Top Online Retailers According to WebSitePulse

WebSitePulse ™ - a leading provider of global, independent and remote monitoring of web applications and e-business transactions announced the final results from its Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report. The results show that even though most of the leading online retailers offered uninterrupted and consistently reliable web services during the intense shopping period for Valentine's Day, some of them experienced serious availability and uptime problems.

Orlando, FL (PRWeb) February 23, 2007 -- WebSitePulse ™ - a leading provider of global, independent and remote monitoring of web applications and e-business transactions announced the final results from its Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report. The results show that even though most of the leading online retailers offered uninterrupted and consistently reliable web services during the intense shopping period for Valentine's Day, some of them experienced serious availability and uptime problems.

The Top 3 performers with the fastest response times are Poetry.com, Godiva.com and Brookstone.com. The performer with the slowest response time was Hallmark.com

Only two retailers maintained 100% uptime of their online stores: Macys.com and Proflowers.com. Of the ten sites monitored, Hallmark.com came in at number 10 with 96% uptime.

Hallmark.com was unavailable for online customers several times. On February 1, 8, 12 and 14 the website had with availability problems for several hours each of these days and had very slow response time on February 14, when Valentine's Day shoppers, who missed the deadline for ordering a real gift rushed to Hallmark.com to order e-cards. Hallmark.com showed similar results last year for the 2006 Valentine's Day Performance Report.

Another major event was when Diamond.com was unavailable for shopping more than 6 hours on February 07. At 8:53 am the site went completely down and this status continued for more than 6 hours. The website was completely restored at 2:55 pm EST and the response times of the web transaction were back to their normal levels.

"For a second consecutive year, WebSitePulse completes its Valentine's Day Retail Performance Report and continues its efforts to provide the Internet community with public information about the performance of popular online destinations during national holidays and other important events," says Iavor Marinoff, CEO of WebSitePulse. "WebSitePulse experts carefully examine all incidents during the measurement periods and make every effort to help companies to improve their web performance and to determine and eliminate the causes for websites failure, providing them with essential analytical data," he adds.

WebSitePulse Performance Reports measure uptime and response time as the most important web metrics for the availability and the reliability of any web-based operation, critical for the end users' overall online experience. The reports reflect not only the performance of the websites' home pages, but typically measure a complete web transaction that is representative of the end users' interactions with a website.

About WebSitePulse ™:

WebSitePulse is a leading provider of advanced, independent, and remote monitoring of web-based systems and e-business transactions. WebSitePulse monitoring increases the efficiency of mission-critical e-business operations, and reduce the risks of failed Internet transactions and loss of revenue.

The global, independent service offers immediate error detection and real-time, multimedia alerts, as well as available detailed, customer-controlled, purpose-specific reports with drill-down capabilities and snapshot options.

WebSitePulse is a service of Image Project, Inc. - a privately owned corporation for e-business solutions based in Orlando, Florida, USA.

For more information, please visit www.WebSitePulse.com

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