Top 10 Epic Website Fails During 2012 Holidays

Despite planning for a year to capture a portion of the $40 billion e-commerce opportunity that took place during the 2012 holiday season, epic website fails occurred at Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie, Sears and other major retail websites.
 

Real-time performance monitoring firm Panopta monitored 130 retail websites during the recently completed holiday selling season and determined Americans spent $42 billion (according to figures released by comScore) in retail e-commerce purchases over the holiday season.
 

After crunching the numbers from November 15th, 2012 to January 4th, 2013, Panopta found there were over 128 hours of total downtime from 86 of the 130 retail sites. The 86 sites with outages averaged 89 minutes of total downtime.
 

The remaining 44 had no measurable outages and responded properly to 72,000 checks. The outstanding 44 sites without outages include Nike, Amazon, Macy’s, Williams-Sonoma, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Frys.com.
 

The top 10 sites that had epic fails during the busiest shopping days of the year and the number of downtime hours are as follows:
 

Victoria’s Secret                   18 hours 12 minutes

Gamefly                                  12 hours 38 minutes

J&R                                         12 hours 4 minutes

Finish Line                             11 hours

Kmart                                      10 hours 50 minutes

Blockbuster                           10 hours 40 minutes

Sears                                      10 hours 30 minutes

CDW                                        9 hours 59 minutes

Bass Pro Shop                      7 hours 53 minutes

Harry & David                         7 hours 50 minutes

Overall, the data collected during the 2012 holiday season points to an uptrend for retailer availability compared to previous years.

The data collected is used to create the Panopta Holiday Index, which is a high-level metric for measuring uptime for the top 130 most popular retailers. The index is a free resource used as a comparison tool. Uptime measures a server’s ability to be accessed by a user anywhere in the globe.
 

To find out more about the Panopta Holiday Index click here.