It seems every year the behemoth task of holiday shopping moves farther from the physical confines of brick and mortar stores to cyberspace, fueling the success of e-commerce companies. In fact, earlier this year comScore reported that during the 2012 holiday session, $42.3 billion was spent on e-commerce shopping alone, representing a 14 percent increase from 2011.
E-Commerce Shopping Shows No Signs of Slowing
The propensity towards e-commerce shopping is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Forrester Research contends that U.S. online shopping revenue will surpass $327 billion by 2016, up 45% from $226 billion in 2012 and 62% from $202 billion in 2011. Moreover, e-retail is quickly taking a bigger slice of the retail pie, as analysis forecast that by 2016 e-commerce will account for 9% of total retail sales. This number is up from 7% in both 2012 and 2011.
Website Uptime is Imperative
The holiday season is just weeks away and an increasing consumer base is headed straight for your website—maintaining availability, website uptime and peak application performance has never been more important. With the competition just a click away and the demands of the 21st Century E-Commerce Customer increasing, the question is – do you have the proper website monitoring solution in place to ensure website uptime, page speed, and web application functionality?
Plan Smarter
With one in four consumers abandoning your website if it takes more than four seconds to load, this year’s holiday season has to be all about website uptime, performance and the end user experience. To ensure that your e-commerce company can handle the influx of visitors, you need to assess the overall health of your network. This means continually monitoring the following:
- Conversion Paths: whether consumers can seamlessly purchase products
- Website Speed: how quickly your page loads for the end user
- Critical Infrastructure: to ensure your web servers and applications are running smoothly
In today’s exceedingly competitive environment, a bout of downtime can be disastrous. Just think of the repercussions that happened in 2011 when Target’s brand new e-commerce platform crashed more than six times in November. Due to the complexity of today’s websites and the consequences of stranding customers, now is the time to develop a comprehensive website monitoring strategy.
Are you prepared to handle the surge in traffic that is coming your way?
