E-Florists overwhelmed by Valentine's Day Crush
As online orders for Valentine's Day flowers blossomed last week, online florists found themselves struggling to keep up with huge increases in transaction volumes while customers were forced to practice patience, according to two Web site performance measurement services.
One site, San Diego-based Proflowers.com, was so overwhelmed with traffic that consumers had to wait 30 seconds or more just to download its home page, according to results released by Web measurement firm Keynote Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif. Officials at Proflowers declined to comment on the firm's Web site performance.
The big challenge for many online specialty retailers during holiday shopping bursts is having the ability to scale for big spikes in orders, said Neal Goldman, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston. Being able to scale from, say, 1,000 transactions per day to 100,000 "isn't all that easy," he added.
A spokesman for 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. in Westbury, N.Y., said it handled tens of thousands of orders each day during the holiday period, but he wouldn't comment on the company's Web site performance.
But if the Keynote statistics are any indication, 1-800-Flowers struggled to keep pace during Cupid's crush. According to the survey, the average amount of time needed to download the online florist's home page using a T1 line increased from 1.77 seconds on Feb. 11 to 4.99 seconds one day later.
SolidSpeed Networks Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich., which measures site performance through a program installed on thousands of end-user PCs, reported that 1-800-Flowers averaged 2.05 seconds on home page downloads last week.
There was at least one notable discrepancy between the results posted by the two measurement firms. SolidSpeed reported a home page download time of 1.77 seconds for Proflowers.com, compared with Keynote's reading of 30 seconds. Goldman said these differences could result from different measurement methods or even a glitch in the measurement software.
But some sites held up well despite heavy transaction periods last week. For the one-week period prior to Valentine's Day, Keynote reported that FTD.com Inc. in Downers Grove, Ill., led the pack by averaging just 1.68 seconds for its home page to fully display on a visitor's screen using a T1 connection.
FTD.com CIO Fred Johnson said his company works hard to optimize site performance. For example, the group uses technologies from F5 Networks Inc. in Seattle to balance customer requests across multiple Web servers.
» posted by ITworld staff
Computerworld
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
