What's up with the greeting card websites? You would think they would have been ready for the big influx of traffic on a day like Valentine's Day. The Associated Press reports that a company named Keynote Systems Inc. that checks web traffic found that only 30 percent of their attempts to access several of the major greeting card sites were successful.
Keynote said sites that usually load in two or three seconds were taking an average of 12 seconds or longer.
Problems with Web sites not only frustrate customers but also deprive sites of advertising revenue, especially if a visitor doesn't come back to view or send a card.
The Web site for Hallmark Cards Inc. was inaccessible or slow starting about 6 a.m. EST, according to Keynote. It was back to normal by late morning but got slow again around noon - just as people on the West Coast got to work and opened cards that had arrived in their inboxes, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.
Keynote said it also spotted problems with 123Greetings.com, and The Associated Press found in a test Thursday afternoon that many pages took several seconds to load. But officials at 123Greetings insisted that less than 1 percent of its visitors experienced slowdowns.
"123Greetings.com experienced record traffic today, one of the highest in its history," the company said in a statement. "Problems at other greeting cards sites caused record volumes of users to come over to our site, and we were happy to welcome them all."
Not at all of the traffic was lost because some people who were unable to access a greeting card website probably tried again later. The greeting card companies will get a shot again a year from now.
