Groupon at the Bottom of This Holiday List

A website and application performance monitoring firm tested 11 leading social shopping and daily deals sites for availability and performance during the height of the 2010 holiday shopping season. The company's tested by Watchmouse from November 22 through December 22 included Blippy, Bloomspot, Groupon, Kaboodle, Living Social, Red Laser, Social Currency, Swipely, Tecca and Woot.

The overall results were fairly positive with eight of the 11 eleven sites coming in at the industry standard of 99.9 percent uptime or greater, and two coming in between 99.3 percent and 99.5 percent. Kaboodle performed the best with 99.99 percent uptime, and Groupon performed the worst, landing in the 'unacceptable' category at 96.44 percent because of more than 26 hours of downtime during the monthlong reporting period.

Groupon has been called the fastest-growing company in the history of the Web, and it has been running a successful Grouponicus holiday campaign in addition to its enormously popular daily deals. Today's consumers are not only relying on word-of-mouth recommendations but they also expect a full range of social shopping services when making online purchases - including fast load times.

Online social shopping websites can be particularly vulnerable to slow page load speeds due to large increases in server traffic, especially when combined with the amount of components each website needs to load in order to optimize its product offerings and images.

The full report from Watchmouse can be found here.