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Maximizing eCommerce ROI: Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 2 of the 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.

Start with Part 1: Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

In the last post, we learned about the eCommerce opportunity, its spread across all industries and the nature of eCommerce ecosystem. In this blog post we will see the trends in eCommerce and how you can thrive in your business with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

Your Customers Are Getting Impatient

Because good things come to those who refuse to wait! Your customers don’t want to wait as your website takes more than a blink of an eye to load. They won’t forgive you for slower websites or ill-functional apps.

In a survey done by Internet Retailer the majority of Americans said: “ ..in a real shop, they would wait in line for no longer than 15 minutes. However, on the web, over 25% will abandon a webpage that takes more than 4 seconds to load.”

... 40% will abandon a webpage that takes more than three seconds to load. And when it comes to mobile apps, customers will move on if an action takes more than 300ms to complete. IBM holiday recap report found that the bounce rate is increasing and the conversion rate is decreasing. Over the past few years, we have seen the cart abandonment rate increase to 75% in 2015.

Early this year, Business Insider reported that $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in online shopping carts this year. And savvy eCommerce providers can recover about 63% of it.

What can a savvy eCommerce provider like you do to bring back your money?

See It as the Customer Sees It

The individual components of your eCommerce might be working well, but what happens when it all comes together? Proactively monitoring your web and mobile applications exactly as seen by the customers gives you a clear picture of user experience. Monitor actual user transactions and not just the components that support them. Be ready for whatever challenge your customers throw at you.

Tip: Monitor your web and mobile applications at the real browser level, where all the moving parts of the applications come together. Monitor from where your customers are or where they will be, taking into account the user experience.

Holiday Season is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Gone are the days when retail just worried about the peak demands during Black Friday. This fascinating report on last holiday season done by Custora revealed that Black Friday and Cyber Monday only generated 10% of the Holiday revenue. The rest, 90% was generated over the period of 58 days.


As eCommerce expands across all industries, the peak seasons change. As you go abroad, your peak seasons and times of operation change. Now your customers celebrate Chinese New Year or International Singles Day or Earth Day.

Tip: Don’t wait for your holiday or peak season to start monitoring and optimizing performance of your eCommerce offering. Continually monitor, understand and improve your applications for all expected and unexpected peak seasons.

Make Room for New Holidays

This year we saw a brand new holiday called Amazon Prime Day. Walmart immediately mocked Amazon about it and both eCommerce providers saw a peak in traffic. Amazon claimed that Prime Day was bigger than Black Friday 2014.


Was it successful or not is beyond the scope of this blogpost. But it was indeed a great example of performance testing in production. It may seem like a distant future for your industry but it’s closer than it appears. We believe that these "retailer specific" holidays will become the new normal going forward. This gives companies a chance to test their applications and the infrastructure that supports it in real time. So when the actual peak season comes, they can be better prepared.

Tip: Performance testing in production is here to stay. Not everyone has the resource strength of Amazon and Walmart but depending on your industry, customers and nature of business, you can execute some flavor of it and become the pioneer.

Read Part 3: Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

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

The Latest

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...

Maximizing eCommerce ROI: Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 2 of the 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.

Start with Part 1: Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

In the last post, we learned about the eCommerce opportunity, its spread across all industries and the nature of eCommerce ecosystem. In this blog post we will see the trends in eCommerce and how you can thrive in your business with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

Your Customers Are Getting Impatient

Because good things come to those who refuse to wait! Your customers don’t want to wait as your website takes more than a blink of an eye to load. They won’t forgive you for slower websites or ill-functional apps.

In a survey done by Internet Retailer the majority of Americans said: “ ..in a real shop, they would wait in line for no longer than 15 minutes. However, on the web, over 25% will abandon a webpage that takes more than 4 seconds to load.”

... 40% will abandon a webpage that takes more than three seconds to load. And when it comes to mobile apps, customers will move on if an action takes more than 300ms to complete. IBM holiday recap report found that the bounce rate is increasing and the conversion rate is decreasing. Over the past few years, we have seen the cart abandonment rate increase to 75% in 2015.

Early this year, Business Insider reported that $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in online shopping carts this year. And savvy eCommerce providers can recover about 63% of it.

What can a savvy eCommerce provider like you do to bring back your money?

See It as the Customer Sees It

The individual components of your eCommerce might be working well, but what happens when it all comes together? Proactively monitoring your web and mobile applications exactly as seen by the customers gives you a clear picture of user experience. Monitor actual user transactions and not just the components that support them. Be ready for whatever challenge your customers throw at you.

Tip: Monitor your web and mobile applications at the real browser level, where all the moving parts of the applications come together. Monitor from where your customers are or where they will be, taking into account the user experience.

Holiday Season is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Gone are the days when retail just worried about the peak demands during Black Friday. This fascinating report on last holiday season done by Custora revealed that Black Friday and Cyber Monday only generated 10% of the Holiday revenue. The rest, 90% was generated over the period of 58 days.


As eCommerce expands across all industries, the peak seasons change. As you go abroad, your peak seasons and times of operation change. Now your customers celebrate Chinese New Year or International Singles Day or Earth Day.

Tip: Don’t wait for your holiday or peak season to start monitoring and optimizing performance of your eCommerce offering. Continually monitor, understand and improve your applications for all expected and unexpected peak seasons.

Make Room for New Holidays

This year we saw a brand new holiday called Amazon Prime Day. Walmart immediately mocked Amazon about it and both eCommerce providers saw a peak in traffic. Amazon claimed that Prime Day was bigger than Black Friday 2014.


Was it successful or not is beyond the scope of this blogpost. But it was indeed a great example of performance testing in production. It may seem like a distant future for your industry but it’s closer than it appears. We believe that these "retailer specific" holidays will become the new normal going forward. This gives companies a chance to test their applications and the infrastructure that supports it in real time. So when the actual peak season comes, they can be better prepared.

Tip: Performance testing in production is here to stay. Not everyone has the resource strength of Amazon and Walmart but depending on your industry, customers and nature of business, you can execute some flavor of it and become the pioneer.

Read Part 3: Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

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

The Latest

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...