Flower Web Sites Fill Cupid's Quiver, Keynote Reports

Business Wire, Feb 18, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2004

-- Valentine's Day E-Commerce Site Performance Held Up Well with

Only a Few Glitches

-- In Spite of Increased Online Valentine's Day Spending, Sites

Handle the Crowds

Valentine's Day visitors to online flower sites were able to easily shower their sweethearts with blossoms and there were only a few small glitches for those accessing greeting card sites. They ran into a few slowdowns while accessing popular greeting card sites, according to measurements taken by Keynote (Nasdaq:KEYN), the Internet Performance Authority(TM). The analysis period covers 5 AM EST on February 13 to 5 AM EST on February 15.

Most sites performed noticeably well through the Valentine's Day onslaught, showing great overall success rates with average availability around 98.0 percent (total range varied from 97.0 percent at the low end to 99.9 percent at the high end). Accessing the home pages (response time) took around 3.0 seconds on average. As a means of comparison, these success rates and response times compare favorably to the two-week period before Valentine's Day.

Online flower purchasing sites delivered their content in a very timely and efficient manner with overall success rates for FlowersDirect of 99.9 percent, ProFlowers of 99.8 percent, and FTD and 1800flowers of 98.0 percent success rates each during the period evaluated.

Other than a few brief periods of below average performance, Hallmark performed remarkably well for the period. The Hallmark site experienced the slowest response times during the peak hours on February 13 with downloads up to 33.0 seconds and success rates falling at times to below 70.0 percent. On February 14, the Hallmark site response times peaked at 12.0 seconds but success rate remained above 98.0 percent.

Several gift sites had small spikes in performance including Chocoholic and Ashford. These increases in download performance lasted anywhere from 2 to 4 hours depending on the site and brought success rates at times to 94.5 percent.

More than ever before, American's preparing for Valentine's Day are turning to the Internet, according to new research from comScore, a provider of Internet audience measurement services. The firm said that online spending in the Flowers & Gifts, Jewelry & Watches and Health & Beauty categories leapt 49 percent in the 10 days ending February 11, compared with the same period a year ago. "Last year, the three weeks ending on Valentine's Day accounted for a full 12% of the year's online spending in the Flowers & Gifts category," said Dan Hess, a senior vice president at comScore. "This year's growth rates are an encouraging sign for retailers in 'gifting' categories thus far, and consumers will continue to buy some products -- such as flowers -- virtually until the last minute."

"Valentine's Day is a stricter test of performance than were the Christmas holidays because the target delivery date for an electronic greeting card is only a single day," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet Analyst for Keynote. "While the activity level at a few sites led to some inconsistent performance and success rates, the Valentine's Day sites were generally well prepared for the traffic and handled their customer requests efficiently, which is a remarkable achievement based on the growth reported by comScore."

Keynote measured the performance and success rate of 15 major chocolate, flower, fine gift and greeting-card web sites from January 26th through 5 AM Eastern on February 15th.

Keynote measured the performance and availability of the home pages of Valentines gift sites every hour around the clock over T1/T3 connections from 25 metropolitan areas in the United States, a subset of Keynote's global network of measurement computers around the world.

Keynote maintains the world's largest and most statistically accurate and representative 24/7 real time Web site measurement and monitoring infrastructure for understanding and optimizing performance from the end user perspective. For the purposes of this study, Keynote captured the response times of the Web sites from measurement computers located in 25 U.S. cities placed on the following backbones: Atlanta Uunet, Boston Uunet, Chicago Uunet, Cincinnati C&W, Cleveland Genuity, Dallas Uunet, Denver Qwest, Detroit Level3, Houston Uunet, Kansas City Sprint, Los Angeles Qwest, Miami Uunet, Milwaukee Cogent, Minneapolis Genuity, New York AT&T, Philadelphia Level3, Phoenix AT&T, Pittsburgh MH2, Portland MH1, San Diego Level 3, San Francisco Sprint, Seattle Internap, St. Louis Level3, Tampa Qwest, Washington D.C. Qwest.

About Keynote

Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems, Inc., (Nasdaq "KEYN"), The Internet Performance Authority(R), is the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote's services enable corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test, diagnose and optimize their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Approximately 2,200 corporate IT departments and 17,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to increase revenues and reduce downtime costs, without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.