Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is Part 1 of a multipart blog series explaining trends in eCommerce as a result of underlying trends in technology and how ecommerce providers can maximize ROI with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

eCommerce is growing at 17% per year. Last year, the US holiday season rang up more than $600 billion dollars in revenue, and online and eCommerce generated $102 billion of that. But unfortunately eCommerce is stereotyped as an online version of the retail industry. It is much more than that. In 2013 Gartner produced a report laying out various industries by their eCommerce potential. Retail, wholesale, travel and entertainment made it to the top. No surprises there. But some were surprised by seeing traditional industries such as mining, agriculture, government, education etc. on there.


A lot has changed in the past two years; the not so eCommerce-y industries have come a long way in terms of online presence. Those who don't provide online shopping see the offline sales are being influenced by the online presence. We've seen feed manufacturers, steel distributors, and even utility providers using eCommerce to expand the geographical reach. Automotive and aerospace go the eCommerce way in the aftermarkets. All things said, eCommerce is relevant across all industries and it's growing at an exponential rate.

Everyone who provides eCommerce understands the significance of website or mobile application performance and how it directly hits the bottom line. And those who are new to eCommerce have started realizing the monetary consequences of page loads and bounce rates. When Amazon was down in 2013, they lost more than $60K per minute. BestBuy faced a huge social media backlash when shoppers couldn't use Bestbuy.com during holiday season. On the flip side:

"By reducing page load time to 1.2 seconds from whopping (!) 6 seconds, Shopzilla saw 12% increase in revenue"

"AutoAnything.com increased conversion rates by 9% by cutting down the load time by half."

You get it; poor eCommerce performance directly hits your bottom line. No matter what industry you are in, you should be monitoring your websites, web applications and mobile applications to ensure that your customers and end users can do what they wish to do.

Poor eCommerce is no different than going to a physical store, and seeing that it's closed or only few checkout lanes are open and there is a huge line. What do you do if it takes too long? You switch the lanes or you go to a different shop. That other lane in the eCommerce world is a different website, a different eCommerce store, maybe a competitor.

eCommerce Ecosystem

Modern eCommerce heavily relies on external and third-party components for critical functionalities such as search, cart and payment etc. And how can we forget the online advertising and social media plugins that bring traffic? Last holiday season, more than 30% of eCommerce traffic was routed by social media plugins. Companies that provide the following important eCommerce functionalities via plugins, APIs, applications or tools are important players in the eCommerce ecosystem.


If your company is part of the eCommerce ecosystem, the enormity of the eCommerce opportunity and growth applies to you! Google maps, PayPal, Elasticsearch, Evernote, Flickr get more than billion calls every day. Expedia quoted that 90% of its revenue comes from API business. In 2013, Salesforce generated 50% of its $3B revenue via APIs. Let's say you are the provider of payment processing API. It is your responsibility to ensure that your API is available 24x7, performing per your consumer's requirements and is returning right data at the right places. A poor performing API slows down the adoption, results in poor rating and reduced brand equity, finally reducing revenue.

As an eCommerce provider or part of the eCommerce ecosystem, you can leverage the entirety of eCommerce opportunity with proactive monitoring.

In the upcoming parts of this blog series, we will cover the trends in eCommerce as a result of trends in technology, the special case of peak season and how you can maximize the eCommerce ROI with proactive performance monitoring.

Read Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari is Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

5 Reasons Traditional VPNs Struggle in a Cloud-First World

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

What 1.8 Million Outages Say About Who Is Really On Call in August

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

Why Enterprises Are So Unhappy with Their IT Infrastructure

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

Agentic AI Just Became Your Newest Production Dependency. Are You Tracking It Like One?

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...

Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is Part 1 of a multipart blog series explaining trends in eCommerce as a result of underlying trends in technology and how ecommerce providers can maximize ROI with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

eCommerce is growing at 17% per year. Last year, the US holiday season rang up more than $600 billion dollars in revenue, and online and eCommerce generated $102 billion of that. But unfortunately eCommerce is stereotyped as an online version of the retail industry. It is much more than that. In 2013 Gartner produced a report laying out various industries by their eCommerce potential. Retail, wholesale, travel and entertainment made it to the top. No surprises there. But some were surprised by seeing traditional industries such as mining, agriculture, government, education etc. on there.


A lot has changed in the past two years; the not so eCommerce-y industries have come a long way in terms of online presence. Those who don't provide online shopping see the offline sales are being influenced by the online presence. We've seen feed manufacturers, steel distributors, and even utility providers using eCommerce to expand the geographical reach. Automotive and aerospace go the eCommerce way in the aftermarkets. All things said, eCommerce is relevant across all industries and it's growing at an exponential rate.

Everyone who provides eCommerce understands the significance of website or mobile application performance and how it directly hits the bottom line. And those who are new to eCommerce have started realizing the monetary consequences of page loads and bounce rates. When Amazon was down in 2013, they lost more than $60K per minute. BestBuy faced a huge social media backlash when shoppers couldn't use Bestbuy.com during holiday season. On the flip side:

"By reducing page load time to 1.2 seconds from whopping (!) 6 seconds, Shopzilla saw 12% increase in revenue"

"AutoAnything.com increased conversion rates by 9% by cutting down the load time by half."

You get it; poor eCommerce performance directly hits your bottom line. No matter what industry you are in, you should be monitoring your websites, web applications and mobile applications to ensure that your customers and end users can do what they wish to do.

Poor eCommerce is no different than going to a physical store, and seeing that it's closed or only few checkout lanes are open and there is a huge line. What do you do if it takes too long? You switch the lanes or you go to a different shop. That other lane in the eCommerce world is a different website, a different eCommerce store, maybe a competitor.

eCommerce Ecosystem

Modern eCommerce heavily relies on external and third-party components for critical functionalities such as search, cart and payment etc. And how can we forget the online advertising and social media plugins that bring traffic? Last holiday season, more than 30% of eCommerce traffic was routed by social media plugins. Companies that provide the following important eCommerce functionalities via plugins, APIs, applications or tools are important players in the eCommerce ecosystem.


If your company is part of the eCommerce ecosystem, the enormity of the eCommerce opportunity and growth applies to you! Google maps, PayPal, Elasticsearch, Evernote, Flickr get more than billion calls every day. Expedia quoted that 90% of its revenue comes from API business. In 2013, Salesforce generated 50% of its $3B revenue via APIs. Let's say you are the provider of payment processing API. It is your responsibility to ensure that your API is available 24x7, performing per your consumer's requirements and is returning right data at the right places. A poor performing API slows down the adoption, results in poor rating and reduced brand equity, finally reducing revenue.

As an eCommerce provider or part of the eCommerce ecosystem, you can leverage the entirety of eCommerce opportunity with proactive monitoring.

In the upcoming parts of this blog series, we will cover the trends in eCommerce as a result of trends in technology, the special case of peak season and how you can maximize the eCommerce ROI with proactive performance monitoring.

Read Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari is Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

5 Reasons Traditional VPNs Struggle in a Cloud-First World

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

What 1.8 Million Outages Say About Who Is Really On Call in August

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

Why Enterprises Are So Unhappy with Their IT Infrastructure

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

Agentic AI Just Became Your Newest Production Dependency. Are You Tracking It Like One?

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...