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.
The Latest
Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 2 covers more on Observability ...
The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, covering IT performance topics. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, observability, AIOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 1 covers APM and Observability ...
To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...
Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...
Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...
Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...
This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...
As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...
