Since IT Ops and application performance are an important part of e-commerce, APMdigest is following up our list of 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions with predictions from industry experts about how e-commerce will evolve in 2023.

E-COMMERCE LOOKS TO OBSERVABILITY

As e-commerce platforms grow in popularity, it's critical that they stay one step ahead of IT issues before they arise. With so many brands reliant on their service, technical errors could be fatal. Implementing a unified observability solution is one way to gain a comprehensive overview of operations and see how they're running from end to end. Any issues are immediately flagged so IT teams can tackle problems at the source, before they can impact sales.
Ryan Worobel
CIO, LogicMonitor

OPTIMIZING SITE PERFORMANCE

In the post-pandemic global economy, e-commerce has increasingly become an important element of business strategy and a solid catalyst for economic development for many business sectors. A good deal now means ease of shopping, different payment methods, easier ways to checkout, track your orders, and most importantly — site performance. Site performance directly influences your conversion rates and search engine rankings. As per statistics, for every second beyond three seconds, customers must wait for a page to load, leading to an overall loss in repeat customers. A study by Amazon indicated that a page speed slowdown of just one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. Site performance can be optimized and depends on multiple factors like how well your e-commerce application is overall architected, caching, use of CDN, and foremost, how scalable and robust your infrastructure is.
Seema Nair
Director, Application Development, Synoptek

OPEN DATA PLATFORMS

Alongside other digital experiences, e-commerce has migrated to a headless management approach. This decoupling is crucial to building innovative shopping experiences that can be more swiftly adapted based on adapting business requirements. However, robust e-commerce applications require a number of disparate domain-specific systems behind the scenes to power them — each adding in bottlenecks, latency, and maintenance at their points of integration. In the coming year, we will see more organizations turning to open data platforms so they can seamlessly manage products, orders, inventory, allocation, in-store kiosks, brick-and-mortar point-of-sale, analytics, automation workflows, and more in one unified portal. APIs, automation, and alerting can integrate into any required services, and keystone software and organizations can reduce complexity, software licenses, and gaps in capabilities with flexible platforms that can grow alongside the business.
Ben Haynes
Co-Founder and CEO, Directus

DATA TRANSPARENCY AND PLANNING TECHNOLOGY

The supply chain experienced an accelerated digital transformation during the past few years. In 2023, organizations will be able to better anticipate their inventories and shipments with AI. e-commerce and supply chain managers will focus on operational efficiency for scenario planning, process mining and will utilize digital twins more often. When it comes to application performance within e-commerce platforms, data transparency and planning technologies will be key in managing the ebb and flow of supply chains and consumer interest.
Eric Tan
CIO, Coupa

HEADLESS COMPOSABLE E-COMMERCE PLATFORMS

Data and personalization are revenue drivers for e-commerce companies. The old monolithic approach used for developing websites uses a standard template that lacks the ability to personalize content and add new features to sites. In 2023, we will see companies empowering their teams to use headless, composable commerce platforms to combine personalized content and commerce together to enhance user experience. DXPs will be composed by enterprises with best in class components rather than bought as monolithic solutions.
Chris Bach
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy and Creative Officer, Netlify

CONVERSATIONAL COMMERCE

Conversational Commerce Grows: More e-commerce engagement and transactions will be facilitated through the likes of chatbots, AR/VR, and similar interactive tools. This will not only improve experiences through intelligent guidance for example, but it will also reduce the effort shoppers have to extend when finding and picking correct products.
Sanjay Mehta
Head of Industry and Commerce, Lucidworks

ANONYMOUS PERSONALIZATION

Move to Anonymous Personalization: The enablement of privacy regulations such as CCPA and GDPR will move the focus of personalization away from using explicit consumer data to more predicted approaches such as neural- and vector-based approaches. These approaches leverage anonymous data points such as context and behavior to form hyper relevant experiences.
Sanjay Mehta
Head of Industry and Commerce, Lucidworks