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Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 3 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

Start with Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Compete with Yourself First

eCommerce is ever-changing and so are the customers, who are the raison d'être of eCommerce. As you expand your offerings and start catering to different demographics, your competitive landscape becomes more complex. Now you are competition against the companies in your market as well as your historic self. Don't ignore your current and returning customers while running after the new ones. When a single second of page load delay and every instance of poor performance directly hits your bottom line, make baselining the first step of your performance optimization strategy.

Tip: Monitor in pre-production environment to baseline your performance. Compare that against your historic self and your competitor's performance.

Be Prepared for the Age of the Customer

In the Age of the Customer, your customers decide where and how they want to access your eCommerce platform. They select the browsers, the Internet service providers, the wireless networks and the physical devices on which they would access your website or the app. eMarketer did a fantastic report on trends in the world of Mobile eCommerce or m-commerce as they call it. Online shoppers love mobile but 37% hated the inconsistencies in user experience across various devices. Customers demand seamless experience across all the devices and platforms they use to access your eCommerce offering.

Tip: Monitor your eCommerce offering – Websites, web apps, mobile responsive web and native mobile app considering all diverse use cases: various locations, real devices, browsers, Internet providers and wireless networks.

Mobile Rocks but Web Still Matters

We all hear how mobile is taking over the world. It's the "Cloud first, Mobile first" world. In developing countries more people access the Internet from their mobile devices than the desktops. Per the IBM Holiday report, conversion rate and average value per order was higher for desktops than for mobile devices. Small screen devices browse, large screen devices buy!


India's largest eCommerce provider Flipkart announced that they will soon go only-app just like their newly acquired asset Myntra. The adoption and usage of the mobile phone varies across different geographies and industries. Personally, I would be far more comfortable buying a pair of shoes via my smartphone than filing my taxes or buying my health insurance. Mobile matters for some industries, but desktop is still relevant and prominent for others.

Mobile app users may be more forgiving about the load time, but they reportedly leave the app if an action doesn't complete in 300ms. Ensuring performance on diverse mobile devices running on various networks is challenging for the app providers. Customers who want to browse and research on smartphone, add items to cart on a tablet, and checkout on a desktop are not making this easy. That's why we see many companies opting for mobile responsive web. The pros and cons of mobile responsive web vs native app is a discussion for another time. But as m-commerce grows, the need for improving and maintaining mobile experience grows.

Tip: Understand the conversion paths for your eCommerce offering and bulletproof them. Strive for ultimate mobile experience without losing the focus on websites.

In the next post, I will conclude the blog series with understanding the significance of APIs in eCommerce and a final tip to measure and monitor the application performance.

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 in the Age of the Customer

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 3 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

Start with Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Compete with Yourself First

eCommerce is ever-changing and so are the customers, who are the raison d'être of eCommerce. As you expand your offerings and start catering to different demographics, your competitive landscape becomes more complex. Now you are competition against the companies in your market as well as your historic self. Don't ignore your current and returning customers while running after the new ones. When a single second of page load delay and every instance of poor performance directly hits your bottom line, make baselining the first step of your performance optimization strategy.

Tip: Monitor in pre-production environment to baseline your performance. Compare that against your historic self and your competitor's performance.

Be Prepared for the Age of the Customer

In the Age of the Customer, your customers decide where and how they want to access your eCommerce platform. They select the browsers, the Internet service providers, the wireless networks and the physical devices on which they would access your website or the app. eMarketer did a fantastic report on trends in the world of Mobile eCommerce or m-commerce as they call it. Online shoppers love mobile but 37% hated the inconsistencies in user experience across various devices. Customers demand seamless experience across all the devices and platforms they use to access your eCommerce offering.

Tip: Monitor your eCommerce offering – Websites, web apps, mobile responsive web and native mobile app considering all diverse use cases: various locations, real devices, browsers, Internet providers and wireless networks.

Mobile Rocks but Web Still Matters

We all hear how mobile is taking over the world. It's the "Cloud first, Mobile first" world. In developing countries more people access the Internet from their mobile devices than the desktops. Per the IBM Holiday report, conversion rate and average value per order was higher for desktops than for mobile devices. Small screen devices browse, large screen devices buy!


India's largest eCommerce provider Flipkart announced that they will soon go only-app just like their newly acquired asset Myntra. The adoption and usage of the mobile phone varies across different geographies and industries. Personally, I would be far more comfortable buying a pair of shoes via my smartphone than filing my taxes or buying my health insurance. Mobile matters for some industries, but desktop is still relevant and prominent for others.

Mobile app users may be more forgiving about the load time, but they reportedly leave the app if an action doesn't complete in 300ms. Ensuring performance on diverse mobile devices running on various networks is challenging for the app providers. Customers who want to browse and research on smartphone, add items to cart on a tablet, and checkout on a desktop are not making this easy. That's why we see many companies opting for mobile responsive web. The pros and cons of mobile responsive web vs native app is a discussion for another time. But as m-commerce grows, the need for improving and maintaining mobile experience grows.

Tip: Understand the conversion paths for your eCommerce offering and bulletproof them. Strive for ultimate mobile experience without losing the focus on websites.

In the next post, I will conclude the blog series with understanding the significance of APIs in eCommerce and a final tip to measure and monitor the application performance.

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 ...