Black Friday Traffic Takes Down Sears.com

Sears.com was inaccessible to U.S. shoppers for two hours on Friday in what was the most notable Web hiccup of the holiday gift-buying season's official start. Other sites, including Amazon.com Inc., experienced minor slowdowns, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based research group. Starting a week and a half ago, Keynote began tracking the performance of about 30 big online retailers, logging the time it took to find a product and start checking out. Keynote's list includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy's Inc., Circuit City and others; the system takes measurements every 15 minutes from computers in 10 major U.S. cities. Sears Holdings Corp.'s site started to crawl at around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, when loading a page on the site topped one minute. From about 10:30 to 12:30, Sears posted a message asking shoppers to try again in a few minutes. White said Sears was among the retailers that stumbled last year on Black Friday.

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