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2014 Holiday Recap: Here's What Mattered to Online Shoppers

Mike Azevedo

E-commerce is a $220 billion industry in the US, growing nearly 17 percent a year, according to AmeriCommerce. As the consumer landscape rapidly evolves alongside the rise of e-commerce, retailers are being prompted to reevaluate their business models.

As the holidays are often the most profitable time of the year for retailers, Clustrix conducted the 2014 Holiday Shopping Season Trends Survey in January 2015 to identify the emerging consumer trends specific to the holiday season. Here’s what mattered to online shoppers:

■ Site performance – poor performance caused site abandonment

■ Convenience of online shopping

■ Bargains

■ Free shipping

■ Buying on the go – mobile shopping

Per our survey, convenience, bargains and free shipping get consumers to load up their shopping carts, but the most interesting finding was the importance of site performance.

Poor Site Performance - The Cost to E-Commerce Merchants

43 percent of consumers surveyed reported experiencing “website performance” issues e.g., slowly loading pages and images, failed pages, etc. So what did they do when the e-commerce site was slow?

■ 42 percent left the site

■ 19 percent sought another vendor

■ 8 percent reacted via social media

E-commerce vendors can lose thousands of dollars in revenue, especially during peak seasons, if their sites slow down or go down. While not every business is Amazon, who lost $60,000 per minute when they went down a few years ago, small to medium sized e-commerce merchants have also reported losing $10,000 to $30,000 per minute of downtime.

A common culprit causing site performance issues is the database (e.g., MySQL) that runs under the e-commerce application (e.g., Magento). To avoid website slow downs (and crashes), e-tailers should assess whether their database is up to the job. While MySQL is a widely popular database, it also has scaling issues that can cause website performance problems. Consider adopting a more scalable database. A scale-out solution has the ability to grow with the ever-increasing demands your online business faces. After all, no merchant can afford lost customers, lost sales and most importantly, lost revenue.

Here are some additional findings:

Consumers prefer to shop online, even on Black Friday: On Cyber Monday, almost two-thirds (62 percent) of consumers reported shopping online. In fact, Cyber Monday is now the largest shopping day of the year. Additionally, nearly half (48 percent) of respondents shopped online on Black Friday whereas only 26 percent shopped in store on Black Friday. Traditionally an in-store shopping day, Black Friday drew in more traffic online.

Bargains and free shipping matter: A whopping 87 percent of those surveyed said they’d buy an item because it was on sale (11 percent “always”, and 76 percent “yes, depending on the item”). Additionally, three-fourths (74 percent) of consumers claim that better shipping rates and options would influence their purchase decisions on Cyber Monday.

Mobile devices reign supreme: Mobile devices and tablets are beginning to play a large role in e-commerce, from researching prices and products in advance of a purchase and for the purchase itself. Survey findings revealed that nearly half of consumers (47 percent) reported shopping on their mobile device this holiday season.

Mike Azevedo is CEO of Clustrix.

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2014 Holiday Recap: Here's What Mattered to Online Shoppers

Mike Azevedo

E-commerce is a $220 billion industry in the US, growing nearly 17 percent a year, according to AmeriCommerce. As the consumer landscape rapidly evolves alongside the rise of e-commerce, retailers are being prompted to reevaluate their business models.

As the holidays are often the most profitable time of the year for retailers, Clustrix conducted the 2014 Holiday Shopping Season Trends Survey in January 2015 to identify the emerging consumer trends specific to the holiday season. Here’s what mattered to online shoppers:

■ Site performance – poor performance caused site abandonment

■ Convenience of online shopping

■ Bargains

■ Free shipping

■ Buying on the go – mobile shopping

Per our survey, convenience, bargains and free shipping get consumers to load up their shopping carts, but the most interesting finding was the importance of site performance.

Poor Site Performance - The Cost to E-Commerce Merchants

43 percent of consumers surveyed reported experiencing “website performance” issues e.g., slowly loading pages and images, failed pages, etc. So what did they do when the e-commerce site was slow?

■ 42 percent left the site

■ 19 percent sought another vendor

■ 8 percent reacted via social media

E-commerce vendors can lose thousands of dollars in revenue, especially during peak seasons, if their sites slow down or go down. While not every business is Amazon, who lost $60,000 per minute when they went down a few years ago, small to medium sized e-commerce merchants have also reported losing $10,000 to $30,000 per minute of downtime.

A common culprit causing site performance issues is the database (e.g., MySQL) that runs under the e-commerce application (e.g., Magento). To avoid website slow downs (and crashes), e-tailers should assess whether their database is up to the job. While MySQL is a widely popular database, it also has scaling issues that can cause website performance problems. Consider adopting a more scalable database. A scale-out solution has the ability to grow with the ever-increasing demands your online business faces. After all, no merchant can afford lost customers, lost sales and most importantly, lost revenue.

Here are some additional findings:

Consumers prefer to shop online, even on Black Friday: On Cyber Monday, almost two-thirds (62 percent) of consumers reported shopping online. In fact, Cyber Monday is now the largest shopping day of the year. Additionally, nearly half (48 percent) of respondents shopped online on Black Friday whereas only 26 percent shopped in store on Black Friday. Traditionally an in-store shopping day, Black Friday drew in more traffic online.

Bargains and free shipping matter: A whopping 87 percent of those surveyed said they’d buy an item because it was on sale (11 percent “always”, and 76 percent “yes, depending on the item”). Additionally, three-fourths (74 percent) of consumers claim that better shipping rates and options would influence their purchase decisions on Cyber Monday.

Mobile devices reign supreme: Mobile devices and tablets are beginning to play a large role in e-commerce, from researching prices and products in advance of a purchase and for the purchase itself. Survey findings revealed that nearly half of consumers (47 percent) reported shopping on their mobile device this holiday season.

Mike Azevedo is CEO of Clustrix.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...