Keynote Competitive Research claims that as the Black Friday (News - Alert) and the subsequent holiday season emerges, the performance of the retail web sites of the major companies slow down considerably. On Black Friday, Keynote said that almost all of the major web sites slowed down due to an increase in traffic.

 

The holiday season brings more business for the customers, but they also bring worries to the online entity of the companies as the traffic swells to these sites during the holiday season. The report by Keynote suggests that with proper planning and anticipation, the organizations can still provide a very good experience to their customers even in the holiday season.

 

According to the report, Newegg was very good among the pure online sites, along with Overstock.com. These sites seemed to have more issues later in the afternoon, likely when shoppers shifted their focus from “brick and mortar” to these 'online only' sites.

 

“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,” Ben Rushlo, director of competitive Research at Keynote, said. “The best performing sites overall were Wal-Mart, Sears and Barnes & Noble. Each of these sites did very well during the Black Friday period.”

 

As shoppers were looking for "door buster" deals, various sites had issues very early in the morning at 5:00 a.m. EST, the report stated. The company’s report includes online shopping sites across apparel, electronics, and books and music Web sites and establishes a standard for retailers to measure acceptable performance against.

 

Recently, the company announced that as the nation slowly moves out of its recession it will be monitoring the performance of online retailers during the upcoming critical 2009 online holiday shopping season. Keynote’s online retail transaction performance indices are an early indicator for how well sites might be able to stand up flash crowds that typically swamp sites during the holidays.