Everyone within an e-commerce business knows that the stakes are high during peak shopping events such as Black Friday, Christmas, and many other holiday seasons. Periods like these are make-or-break for your revenue.
Application performance is the key to success. A slow e-commerce website, stalled transactions, or unanticipated downtime invariably leads to frustrated customers, lost sales, and long-term damage to a brand’s reputation. Common Black Friday issues are covered in Roq predicts Black Friday’s tech disasters | Modern Retail.
A 1-second delay in page response can result in 7% reduction in conversions. If an e-commerce site is making $100,000/day, a 1-second delay could potentially cost the site $2.5 million in lost sales annually.
To stay ahead of the game, it’s critical to ensure that your e-commerce platform is ready to handle the surges in traffic and peak volumes that consumer-frenzied online shopping can bring. This is where Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is now essential. With eG Enterprise in your weaponry, your staff can monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot your websites’ performance to keep things running smoothly during these high-stakes events—and maximize your revenue in the process.
Website Performance Matters During High-Traffic Events (aka holidays!)
When customers are eager to make a purchase, even a few seconds of delay can be the difference between a completed sale and a lost opportunity. During big sales events, the platform may be squeezed. E-Commerce infra is often deployed upon high scale load balancers.
During high-traffic events, many IT teams rely upon auto-scaling and load balancing to satisfy demand. For example, new instances (let’s say EC2) are created based on some rules/policies to cope and keep up with the traffic. Even if there is enough capacity to support the traffic, it defies the purpose of it when issues are arising because the app itself is faulty.
In fact, throwing additional resources at performance issues without identifying many root-causes leads to unnecessary costs and the problems will almost certainly return.
Ultimately poor performance leads to:
- Customer dissatisfaction: Today’s people expect instant gratification (well, let’s not get into psychological aspects on whether it’s justified or reasonable). But it is what it is. In that scenario, a sluggish website or unexpected downtime can drive them away and harm your brand.
- Cart / Kart abandonment: A slight delay in page load time can lead customers to abandon their purchase altogether.
- Revenue loss: Every second of delay translates directly into lost sales. A slow site means fewer completed transactions, and customers may turn to your competitors instead.
If your customers encounter any of the above, perhaps your IT teams need to re-evaluate their monitoring suite in place. Performance issues are costly, but fortunately, with the right tools, you can prevent them from happening.
How eG Enterprise APM Helps Boost E-Commerce Performance
With eG Enterprise’s APM, you’re equipped with the right features to proactively monitor, optimize, and resolve issues quickly, ensuring that your e-commerce platform performs at its best—even when the traffic spikes. Here’s how it works:
Automation via a Powerful AIOps Engine
The AIOps engine within eG Enterprise is the backbone of its advanced monitoring capabilities, enabling scalability, discovery, and automation. It ensures day-0 monitoring by auto-discovering components and relationships within the IT environment. Out-of-the-box auto-baselining establishes dynamic thresholds, eliminating the need for manual configurations. This enables real-time anomaly detection, ensuring quick identification of deviations from normal performance.
By correlating events and alarms, the AIOps engine provides root-cause analysis, differentiating between application, database, or infrastructure issues to speed up resolution. Its predictive analytics anticipates potential bottlenecks or failures, ensuring proactive management. Coupled with capacity planning, it helps IT teams right-size infrastructure, optimizing resource usage while maintaining performance. The AIOps-driven ability to scale dynamically matches consumer demand, ensuring systems operate efficiently under varying workloads. This unified intelligence ensures smooth, automated operations across eG Enterprise’s monitoring and management features, minimizing downtime and maximizing performance. Learn more about AIOps-powered alerting: White Paper | Make IT Service Monitoring Simple & Proactive with AIOps Powered Intelligent Thresholding & Alerting.
eG Enterprise even offers self-healing and auto-remediation capabilities that can resolve issues autonomously, further reducing downtime and improving operational efficiency.
Real-Time Monitoring & Synthetic Monitoring of Application Health
Real-time monitoring of your entire e-commerce ecosystem gives your whole organization a clear picture of how your apps, websites, backend systems, and APIs are performing at all times. You get instant alerts if something is messed up—whether it’s a slow-loading page or a lagging payment gateway—so users can fix the problem before your users even notice.
The eG Enterprise Web App Simulator (powerful robotic agent) on the other hand, gives a complimentary approach of efficiently monitoring, optimizing the performance of the application proactively. By simulating real-user interactions even during peak or off-peak hours, it provides a nuanced view of how your application performs under various conditions, helping to identify potential bottlenecks before they impact your end-users (aka customers).
If your checkout page is slowing down because of increased traffic, eG Enterprise will alert IT Administrators/Help Desk/SREs immediately and simple dashboard overviews will help them prioritize, allowing them to proactively resolve the issue before customers’ dissatisfaction becomes apparent. Learn more: What is Real User Monitoring (RUM)? | eG Innovations.
Business Transaction & Analytics:
eG enterprise captures data beyond monitoring from an application! In addition to the platform/container performance and application performance, it also captures the user journey. Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM) features provide even code-level visibility. Learn more:
What is Distributed Tracing? Use Cases and How it fits into APM & Observability | eG Enterprise.
It also means your business can see exactly how customers are interacting with your e-commerce site from start to finish, identifying any slowdowns in the transaction process, such as during browsing or checkout. By optimizing these critical moments, your teams can reduce friction and improve conversion rates.
Synthetic monitoring helps app owners by capturing the user experience journey, transaction analytics helps you to find out any lags in the web/API calls. Holistically, with a single click, App Dev teams are quickly able to harness the power of observability. For instance, IT teams can monitor how long it takes for a customer to complete a purchase. If the checkout page is taking longer than expected, you’ll be able to pinpoint and fix the issue quickly, ensuring a smooth and fast checkout experience.
Learn more: Synthetic Monitoring Tools for Multi-step Web Transactions.
Slice and Dice Analytics
For RUM & BTM data, eG Enterprise gives organizations detailed, actionable insights into both user interactions and business-critical transactions. With RUM, you can analyze real-user behavior, from page load times to session details, helping IT teams pinpoint and fix performance issues that affect user experience. For BTM, eG Enterprise allows your teams to drill down into transaction data, highlighting bottlenecks or errors that impact business operations.
By categorizing this data by these aspects, eG Enterprise’s Reporter helps businesses optimize app’s performance, ensuring seamless user journeys and efficient distributed transactions.
Learn more about BTM, and how RUM and Synthetic Monitoring are necessary and complementary technologies, in Business Transaction Monitoring: Not the Be-All, End-All of APM.
App Traffic Forecasting
The eG Enterprise APM Reporter helps predict traffic patterns by analyzing historical data, e-commerce events such as last year’s Black Friday sales. By leveraging these advanced analytics, eG Enterprise can identify trends and forecast potential traffic spikes, allowing IT teams to proactively scale their infrastructure and optimize performance. This ensures the e-commerce system is prepared to handle increased demand and prevents any slowdowns or outages.
End-to-End Visibility Irrespective of the Platform
Whether the e-commerce app/platform runs on containerized platforms such as Docker or VMware Tanzu or AKS or EKS OpenShift or it runs on any Hypervisor stack such as VMware, HyperV, Citrix, or even a public cloud (Amazon AWS, Alibaba, Microsoft Azure) – we will have you covered. eG Enterprise provides end-to-end visibility into how these platforms and services are performing, helping different IT teams within a business work seamlessly together, even under heavy traffic.
Custom Dashboards and Insights for E-Commerce Business Leaders
APM data isn’t just for developers and IT teams. With eG Enterprise, you can leverage out-of-the-box dashboards or use the simple GUI editor to create custom dashboards that give business leaders valuable insights into the performance of customer facing applications and services. This helps decision-makers stay informed and make adjustments in real time during critical events.
A Single Tool for the Whole Business
Retailers themselves recognize that siloed teams spell disaster when incidents occur on Black Friday or other holidays, see: How Top Retailers Prevent Black Friday Website Disasters: a Cross-Team Approach – Retail TouchPoints. This article raises some good points on contingency planning around communication tools – what if a cloud outage takes out your IT teams communication tools such as MS Teams or M365 Outlook too? – challenges we have some useful advice on in: How to Protect your IT Ops from Cloud Outages.
By providing a unified view and a single tool, simple enough for every team to use – you avoid those silos, visibility gaps and all these issues.
The Bottom Line: Maximize E-Commerce Revenue with eG Enterprise APM
When all is said and done, High-traffic events are key revenue opportunities for e-commerce businesses, but they come with their own set of challenges. To make the most of these events, you need to ensure your website is performing at its peak—especially when the pressure is on.
Research has shown that 75% of shopping cart abandonment occurs during site slowdowns, and a single minute of downtime during peak hours can cost retailers hundreds of thousands in lost sales.
Source: The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research
By leveraging eG Enterprise’s APM solution, your IT teams can collaborate effectively to keep your website running smoothly during high-traffic sales events, boost your revenue, and deliver an exceptional experience for your customers.
Don’t wait until the next big sale to start thinking about performance. Start optimizing today and be ready for the upcoming holiday season – without any performance headaches!
eG Enterprise is an Observability solution for Modern IT. Monitor digital workspaces,
web applications, SaaS services, cloud and containers from a single pane of glass.
Learn more:
If you enjoyed this article, you might find these links of particular interest and relevant to APM for e-commerce:
eG Enterprise is an Observability solution for Modern IT. Monitor digital workspaces,
web applications, SaaS services, cloud and containers from a single pane of glass.
- E-Commerce Monitoring for Applications and Payment Gateways
- Monitoring and Troubleshooting Multi-cloud Infrastructures
- IT Monitoring for Retail & eCommerce | eG Innovations
- How to Protect your IT Ops from Cloud Outages
- Learn how eG Enterprise is helping retail customers such as Shufersal and eBay from our case studies, see: Case Studies | eG Innovations
