Neotys' NeoLoad supports Bon-Ton record breaking Black Friday

04 Feb '11

3 min read

Neotys, a leader in easy-to-use, cost effective load testing tools for web applications, announced The Bon-Ton Stores, Inc. successfully used NeoLoad to test the performance of its strategic ecommerce system prior to Black Friday.

The Bon-Ton Stores, Inc. has corporate headquarters in York, Pennsylvania and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It operates 275 department stores, which includes 11 furniture galleries, in 23 states in the Northeast, Midwest and upper Great Plains. The stores offer a broad assortment of national and private brand fashion apparel and accessories for women, men and children, as well as cosmetics and home furnishings.

Experiencing momentum and growth, The Bon-Ton Stores made a strategic decision to bring its ecommerce system in-house in early 2010. Previously, the company had outsourced this service.

Operating under an extremely aggressive time table, Bon Ton's IT team required a proven application testing tool to ensure the Bon Ton's new ecommerce sites would perform at the level required to service customer demand through the upcoming the holiday season.

The Bon-Ton team evaluated many load testing tools before deciding upon Neotys' NeoLoad, a web stress testing software solution that runs high-load scenarios on web applications to identify performance issues prior to deployment. The Bon-Ton testers appreciated NeoLoad's ability to generate realistic test scenarios. This was critical to verify that customer experiences and performance expectations could be met.

The Bon-Ton team installed NeoLoad and found that it was easy to learn and use and implemented the product in test environments with no trouble. With a limited time window to get ready for Black Friday, these were extremely important features. The team also appreciated NeoLoad's simple to use GUI interface and the tool's reporting capabilities. The Bon-Ton ecommerce site consists of 12 IBM Web Sphere Commerce severs tightly integrated with the company's marketing, merchandising and logistics systems.

Bon-Ton testers used NeoLoad to performance test three virtual user scenarios of — a browser, a shopper and a searcher. For each profile, NeoLoad enabled testers to define and use custom parameters and conduct full and maximum scalability tests, which included being able to support the expected number of concurrent users and provide an orders per hour capacity sufficient to handle customer demand.

“Working with NeoLoad gave us the confidence that our sites were capable of meeting the performance demands of our record breaking Black Friday weekend — in just 5 months we were ready for the holiday rush,” said Daniel Gerard, divisional vice president, technologies and web services, The Bon-Ton Stores. "NeoLoad provides the perfect combination of web and stress testing functionality and ease of use that helped us take our ecommerce operations to the next level and enabled us to keep up with the increasing demands of today's consumer."

"The Bon-Ton Stores continued strategic innovation of its ecommerce operations while taking the operation in-house created the imperative to make sure performance was on target; as Black Friday comes once a year," said Stephane Jammet, vice president of sales and business development Neotys. "We are proud that The Bon-Ton Stores, like so many other high-profile brands, chose NeoLoad as its load and stress testing solution for its online ecommerce presence."

Neotys

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