Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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There are presumably more Android phones and devices out there now than there are iPhones (and iPod Touches). However, it seems Android users keep holding their wallets much closer to their chests than iPhone users and iOS users in general.

Case in point, according to a new report from Distimo, the App Store for iPhone generates almost 4x as much revenue as Google’s Android Market in the US. This also includes revenues from in-app purchases. Even looking at just the App Store for iPad, it outclasses Android Market with 2x the revenue.

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We’re excited for our U.S. readers that Google has introduced its online music service – finally. For the rest of us, we have to wait and see when we’ll be lucky enough to see Google Music’s presence where we live.

Google Music went live almost nine years after Apple opened the doors to its iTunes Store. To see what Google is up against, we have collected a plethora of numbers about iTunes from all over the Web.

As you will see, Google is facing some long odds. We hope for Google’s sake this isn’t a case of too little, too late, considering what a behemoth they are competing with.

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Even though consumer spending this upcoming holiday season may be “careful and controlled,” there’s no doubt that we’ll be struck by the spirit of giving again. If you’re a retailer – online or offline – by all accounts, customers will this year use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to find your store and your products, more than they have before. So get ready, build a mobile web site if you don’t have one or improve the one you already have.

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Valentine’s Day is a great day for any vendor selling flowers. Over the years, a large number of websites selling flowers have sprung up, and as you might expect, many of these websites are flooded by eager shoppers on February 14 wanting to buy flowers and gifts for their loved ones.

This is big business. Americans are expected to spend $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts this year.

Now here is the catch. Every year, some of these websites won’t be prepared to handle the increase in visitor traffic and as a result they slow down significantly, or even crash under the pressure.

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Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.

A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.

But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.

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Paypal has been around since 1998 (eBay bought it in 2002), which is a small eternity in internet time. By now it’s easily the most established online payment solution, so it should be in a great position to benefit from our general tendency to increasingly buy and pay for things online.

And something drastic happened about a year ago. Just look at how traffic to Paypal.com has been growing.

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Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

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People are getting used to broadband connections, more powerful web browsers, and a speedier web experience in general. A new study shows how the expectations of Internet users have changed significantly over the last couple of years. We expect websites to be a lot faster.

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As you may know, PayPal suffered from downtime yesterday. Overall, the problems lasted approximately 4.5 hours before being fully resolved. Since a significant number of e-commerce sites and online services handle some or all of their transactions through PayPal, how much money did the PayPal outage end up costing its users?

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