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December 05 2008
Performance Index: Most top retailers now managing 99%+ availability
House of Fraser stays on top this week, Debenhams recovers — but Littlewoods and HMV suffer downtime and slow page loads
The 2008 Christmas Web Performance Index from Keynote Systems monitors the technical performance quality (in terms of responsiveness and reliability) of the top online retailers and provides an update every week in the run up to Christmas and on to the end of January 2009.
After the disastrous collapse of Debenhams.com two weeks ago, the site has now recovered to record 99.94% availability last week compared to 28% the week before. Toys 'R' Us has also improved its availability, up to 99.01% compared to 96.57% last week and 98.1% the week before — although that still puts it tenth in the Keynote table.
House of Fraser is top again for both availability (100%, equalled this week by Argos and Tesco Direct) and responsiveness (1.06 seconds on average).
HMV is still clearly having problems. It was bottom of the table for responsiveness last week with an average time of 7.23 seconds. This week it's 7.54 seconds and availability was down to 91.11%.
Keynote Christmas Index
Performance and availability (Thursday 27/11/2008 — Wednesday 3/12/2008)
| Company | Average performance (s) | Availability (%) |
| House of Fraser |
1.06 |
100.00 |
|
BHS |
1.39 |
99.88 |
| John Lewis |
1.41 |
99.75 |
|
Toys 'R' Us |
1.55 |
99.01 |
|
Argos |
1.76 |
100.00 |
|
Tesco Direct |
1.80 |
100.00 |
|
Play.com |
2.01 |
99.81 |
|
Debenhams |
2.01 |
99.94 |
|
Hamleys |
2.40 |
99.94 |
|
Selfridges |
2.44 |
99.94 |
|
Amazon |
2.52 |
99.88 |
|
Littlewoods |
2.92 |
92.87 |
|
HMV |
7.54 |
91.11 |
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