Online Marketplace Performance During Valentine Day Shopping Peak

As today's shoppers become more discriminating about their interactions online, the e-commerce sites are required to provide more consistent, positive and more sophisticated experience to their visitors. According to a study conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. among 150 retailers the top priorities include fixing website designs and performance issues and improving the efficiency of online marketing.

Web shopping marketplace traffic increases especially during holidays. Soon Valentine’s Day will approach and from a commercial standpoint it is one of the most lucrative holidays for businesses. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch summarized at MC Marketing Charts on average, each consumer plans to spend $122.98 on Valentine’s Day (similar to last year’s $119.67) resulting in total spending of $17.02 billion.

Valentine’s Day is big business for companies who specialize in seasonal gift items. The most profitable Valentine's Day items are gift cards, candy, flowers and jewelry.


Last year Mon.itor.Us published a report on Flower Delivery Websites: What’s the cost of downtime? Here it summarized information about the availability and performance of 13 of the most popular flower delivery websites during the Valentine season.

Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks these days to show website performance statistics of online shopping marketplace for websites tagged as "greeting cards," "chocolate stores on-line," "jewelry stores," "gift shops Valentine day," "retail." "flowers and gift sites." During the peak of the online shopping season it is possible to compare websites performance and find out how prepared are online shoppers for growing traffic.

Greeting cards sites showed quite good results, but http://www.bellaonline.com_http/ for example was the slowest in a 2 week reports. While several websites in Chocolate stores online, such as http://www.serenatachocolates.com/ and http://www.chocolatefetish.com/ had some availability issues, and were up only 93% and 97% respectively. Jewelry stores report the following websites http://www.glimmerrocks.com/, http://www.preciousglow.com/, http://www.topjewelshops.com,/ http://www.claddaghstore.com/ loaded below 2000 milli-seconds in average. http://www.topjewelshops.com/ was available for 96% of the time. In the Gift shops http://www.valentinesgift.co.uk/ website showed even lower availability last week at 86%, meaning almost 24 hours downtime. From Flower Sites http://www.florist.com/, and http://www.fromyouflowers.com/, http://www.virtualflorist.com/, http://www.1800flowers.com/, http://www.virtualflowers.com/ and others were really good in both website load speed and uptime last week. However, http://www.flowersdirect.co.uk/ showed below average load speed and 96% availabilty.

Availability and performance are important indicators for websites' web success.