Study Says Slow Black Friday Online

December 1, 2009

Online holiday shoppers experienced a mixed bag from a performance perspective on Black Friday, according to an annual study tracking the speed and reliability of the nation's most popular retail Web sites beginning Black Friday and continuing throughout the holiday shopping season from Keynote Competitive Research.

Keynote Competitive research is the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), a global leader in on-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement solutions.

Almost all of the sites on Keynote's online retail shopping index showed slowdowns on the very busy online Black Friday shopping day. Overall, most weathered the storm very well, but there were a few sites that crumbled under the pressure, which continued to surprise Keynote during this critical consumer shopping period, especially in light of an economy in which every dollar counts.

"Overall the quality of the sites tracked on Black Friday improved this year over last, with fewer showing major outages and issues impacting a large number of users," said Ben Rushlo, director of competitive research at Keynote. "The best performing sites overall were Wal-Mart, Sears and Barnes & Noble. Each of these sites did very well during the Black Friday period (6 a.m.-9 EST). Overall, Wal-Mart was the most stable site, showing not a single error (100 percent availability for the day) and very little slowdown. Wal-Mart has struggled in the past with Black Friday traffic, but this year they got it right, offering their customers a consistently fast and reliable experience. Wal-Mart and the other good quality sites prove that with proper planning, load testing and focus it is possible to offer customers a pleasant online experience even when customer volume is the highest."

Of the pure online sites (sites that do not have physical stores), Newegg and Overstock.com. performed well, while other pure online sites struggled. Interestingly, Keynote reported they seemed to have more issues later in the afternoon, likely when shoppers shifted their focus from brick and mortar to these online only sites.

Several sites had issues very early in the morning (5 a.m. EST), likely as shoppers were looking for "door buster" deals. Others struggled more in the afternoon hours as the continued pressure on the site began to build and cause problems.

"This year, there were a few sites that had major issues," Rushlo continued." Keynote noted more issues in the apparel vertical than in other verticals. This is consistent with our findings in years prior. The best site on Keynote's apparel index was Victoria's Secret, as it did not report a single error and virtually no slowdown during the critical Black Friday shopping period."