Sites Fare Well on Cyber Monday After Mixed Performance Friday

E-commerce sites held up well under an onslaught of shoppers on what has become known as Cyber Monday, widely considered one of the heaviest traffic days of the year for Internet retailers, says Keynote Systems Inc. Keynote, which measures Web site performance, said Monday the more than 30 sites it is monitoring during the holiday shopping season sustained no “major” outages or slowdowns as shoppers performed searches and purchases. This, the San Mateo, Calif., company says, stands in “stark contrast” to the performance of some sites on Friday, another popular shopping day known as Black Friday. Keynote says Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s site sustained 10 hours of downtime Friday, resulting in visitors receiving error messages or watching as pages took eight times longer than usual to load. The problem, which began at 4:30 a.m. Eastern time, wasn't resolved until 2:30 p.m., Keynote says. Meanwhile, Federated Department Stores Inc.'s Macy's site also suffered what Keynote calls “severe degradation,” with problems beginning at 5:00 a.m. Eastern time and lasting until 2:00 p.m. Slow performance, says Keynote, typically occurs during a search or during the checkout process. But even on Friday, most sites performed well, Keynote says, citing the example of Amazon.com. The online retailing giant performed smoothly despite a rush of visitors drawn by a promotion for the popular Xbox 360 game console. “Amazon.com has been virtually perfect over the last few days, with no performance slowdowns and only a small period of performance stress when the Xbox 360 promotion was occurring,” said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote, in a statement. “For most online retailers, it has been smooth sailing, but for those with problems, they were among the most significant performance issues we have seen this year,” Rushlo added, in the statement.