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Oriental Trading Site Plummets In Availability—Or Did It?

Written by Evan Schuman
September 10th, 2008
Online customers trying to reach the 76-year-old crafts catalogue retailer Oriental Trading Company found a lot more hassle than crafts last month, according to the latest figures from online availability research firm Gomez. But the apparent Web performance plunge may not have happened, and it's a fascinating look into the limits of Web traffic analysis.

When Gomez reported its latest batch of uptime figures for the Top 50 E-tailers covering the month of August, 3,000-employee Oriental Trading came in dead last. How dead last? The top retailer's high broadband connection (Costco) was a 99.83 percent uptime, and the numbers for retailers stayed in the upper 90s all the way down the list, with the 49th weakest high bandwidth uptime performance going to PC Connection, which clocked in at 98.83 percent uptime. Number 50, Oriental Trading, had only 68.15 percent uptime.

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