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Retailers Confirm: Website Performance Plan is Critical

Maneesh Joshi

You know you should eat your vegetables. You know you should exercise. And now, as shown in the "AppDynamics Holiday Web and Mobile Site Performance Review," you know you should have a site performance plan in place.

Seriously, you probably already knew that. But now here’s the evidence: Retail sites with a site performance troubleshooting process in place were 92 percent more likely to meet or exceed their revenue goals for Black Friday, according to the survey of retail executives.

This inaugural AppDynamics survey puts numbers to what should by now be an accepted belief: Performance Matters. Those who take it seriously have fewer and shorter outages, meet their revenue projections, and make more money.

How many of those sites actually did have performance troubleshooting in place? Just under half: 48 percent. But many retailers are taking steps to catch up. Prior to the holiday season, 57 percent added new performance and monitoring tools, a quarter added staff, and nearly a quarter added hardware. Well over half of those with troubleshooting in place implemented application performance monitoring tools and/or alerting/incident management.

Actual site performance during the Thanksgiving–Cyber Monday holiday had some rough spots. One in five sites experienced at least one outage. On the bright side, more than half diagnosed their outage issue in 10 minutes or less, and 69 percent resolved the outage in less than an hour. While an outage of this duration may not be catastrophic, it is perhaps more costly during this period than any other time of year. And the costs go beyond lost sales — any time a visitor encounters a site problem it damages the brand and potentially the loss of a customer for good.

The survey showed that mobile played a significant role in this holiday period, with more than half of surveyed retailers getting 20 percent or more of their online traffic from mobile devices. One in five retailers said that more than 40 percent of their online traffic came from mobile. This reflects growth in mobile traffic of more than 20 percent over the 2013 holiday season for nearly half of the surveyed retailers.

Sales on mobile devices were a mixed bag. Just over 35 percent report less than five percent of their total web sales were on mobile devices. Another 39 percent credit mobile for 15 percent or more of web sales. While this survey did not break out smartphone vs. tablet, others have (including IBM’s annual holiday survey), and find that tablets account for roughly twice the purchases of smartphones. But any way you slice it, it’s clear that mobile plays a central role in the holiday shopping process. And creating a successful mobile shopping experience should be at the top of every retailer’s list of priorities.

We’ve long known that performance matters to retail success — and every other kind of online success for that matter. This holiday survey shows the real impact of having a site performance plan and tools in place. And it points out the importance of creating an exceptional mobile experience to support the shopping process, and hopefully to start converting more of those shoppers into buyers.

Maneesh Joshi is Senior Director and Head of Product Marketing Strategy at AppDynamics.

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Retailers Confirm: Website Performance Plan is Critical

Maneesh Joshi

You know you should eat your vegetables. You know you should exercise. And now, as shown in the "AppDynamics Holiday Web and Mobile Site Performance Review," you know you should have a site performance plan in place.

Seriously, you probably already knew that. But now here’s the evidence: Retail sites with a site performance troubleshooting process in place were 92 percent more likely to meet or exceed their revenue goals for Black Friday, according to the survey of retail executives.

This inaugural AppDynamics survey puts numbers to what should by now be an accepted belief: Performance Matters. Those who take it seriously have fewer and shorter outages, meet their revenue projections, and make more money.

How many of those sites actually did have performance troubleshooting in place? Just under half: 48 percent. But many retailers are taking steps to catch up. Prior to the holiday season, 57 percent added new performance and monitoring tools, a quarter added staff, and nearly a quarter added hardware. Well over half of those with troubleshooting in place implemented application performance monitoring tools and/or alerting/incident management.

Actual site performance during the Thanksgiving–Cyber Monday holiday had some rough spots. One in five sites experienced at least one outage. On the bright side, more than half diagnosed their outage issue in 10 minutes or less, and 69 percent resolved the outage in less than an hour. While an outage of this duration may not be catastrophic, it is perhaps more costly during this period than any other time of year. And the costs go beyond lost sales — any time a visitor encounters a site problem it damages the brand and potentially the loss of a customer for good.

The survey showed that mobile played a significant role in this holiday period, with more than half of surveyed retailers getting 20 percent or more of their online traffic from mobile devices. One in five retailers said that more than 40 percent of their online traffic came from mobile. This reflects growth in mobile traffic of more than 20 percent over the 2013 holiday season for nearly half of the surveyed retailers.

Sales on mobile devices were a mixed bag. Just over 35 percent report less than five percent of their total web sales were on mobile devices. Another 39 percent credit mobile for 15 percent or more of web sales. While this survey did not break out smartphone vs. tablet, others have (including IBM’s annual holiday survey), and find that tablets account for roughly twice the purchases of smartphones. But any way you slice it, it’s clear that mobile plays a central role in the holiday shopping process. And creating a successful mobile shopping experience should be at the top of every retailer’s list of priorities.

We’ve long known that performance matters to retail success — and every other kind of online success for that matter. This holiday survey shows the real impact of having a site performance plan and tools in place. And it points out the importance of creating an exceptional mobile experience to support the shopping process, and hopefully to start converting more of those shoppers into buyers.

Maneesh Joshi is Senior Director and Head of Product Marketing Strategy at AppDynamics.

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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 ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...