ECommercePerformanceRetail
Every year, a large influx of customers is expected ahead of Christmas. Despite that common knowledge, every year there are the same stories in the media of downtime and vast amounts of lost revenue per minute.
Many of those stores were big companies, like Kmart, Target, and Curry’s PC World, that should already have the necessary digital infrastructure and uptime in place. Even an online payment platform like PayPal went down for some time due to the surge in traffic.
Beyond downtime, slow speeds under load can also be costly for online retailers. Lag times during the 2019 Black Friday sales became so bad that retailers such as Costco had to post a message on its site to let customers know there would be “slow response times,” which is estimated to have lost Costco approximately $11 million.
Poor performance not only results in lost sales – it can also lead to lower customer satisfaction, reduced brand loyalty, and an advantage for the competition. Therefore, the success of a retailer during the crucial Christmas shopping season will come down to delivering a reliable digital experience.
Here are some things retailers can do to help prepare their teams and make the holiday season successful.
Document and practice major incident resiliency processes to get an effective handle on technical problems as they arise. When incidents are managed in a thoughtful, forward-looking way, not only is the resolution process smoother and more thorough, but future incidents can also benefit from the lessons learned.
Real-time monitoring, logging, and tracing tools can track and record continuous snapshots of your network’s overall performance. The information gained from these tools helps with maintaining desired levels of performance, as well as improving network security.
Data visualisation technology helps to analyse and display information in a practical and useful way. A meaningful dashboard enables you to monitor and measure performance and metrics of important business services, including identifying and alerting you of potential problems as soon as they arise.
Establish a baseline for performance to handle expected peak demand. Load testing helps to measure maximum speed and capacity of a system under perfect working conditions, while chaos engineering identifies weaknesses through controlled experiments of random and unpredictable behaviour.
Your website needs the right performance measures in place to capitalise on online shoppers, but there are many more considerations in order to capitalise on the shopping rush this holiday season. Issues with functionality and usability are also major culprits causing shoppers to leave a website, with 18% of online orders abandoned due to a “too long” or “complicated” checkout process.
As customers around the world prepare to spend billions of dollars online every day this holiday season, now is the time to test your website, apps, and back-end systems to ensure they are ready. Find out how our experts can help you capitalise on this holiday season and minimise the risk of any costly downtime.
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