Holiday Shopping Surge Shuts Down Sears.com
Posted on: Sunday, 30 November 2008, 14:30 CST
In one of the Web’s most notable holiday shopping snafus, Sears.com became inaccessible to shoppers for two hours on Friday.
Other online retailers, such as Amazon.com, also experienced slowdowns, according to an Associated Press report that quoted data from research group Keynote Systems Inc.
Keynote began monitoring the performance of about 30 major online retailers ten days ago, tracking the time it took to locate an item and begin the check out process.
In addition to Amazon, Keynote monitored the Web sites of Macy’s Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Circuit City and others using a system that obtained measurements every 15 minutes from computers in 10 major U.S. cities.
Sears Holdings Corp.'s site began slowing considerably around 9:30 a.m. EST on Friday, taking over one minute to load a page on the site. From about 10:30 to 12:30, shoppers saw a message asking them to try again in a few minutes.
Shawn White, director of external operations at San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote Systems Inc., said Sears was among the retailers that also experienced hiccups in Web site performance during last year’s Black Friday.
However, while Sears saw a repeat of their problems this year, other retailers such as Buy.com and Nieman Marcus appear to have solved any past issues.
Although Amazon and Target Inc.’s Web sites, which use Amazon's e-commerce technology, performed slower that usual on Friday, it was not an unbearable experience for customers, White said. At the slowest point, a transaction that took 25 seconds last week took about 40 seconds Friday morning. Keynote’s data showed that Saks Inc. and Kohl's Corp. also had performance issues this year.
Some sites will likely slow down or shut down on Monday as well, White said, as customers resume online shopping from work.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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User Comments (2)
| 2. |
Posted by Jeff on 05/23/2009, 16:06 Sears Site down again! |
| 1. |
Posted by potsonna on 11/30/2008, 19:21 Interesting! |
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