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COVID-19 Prompts Retailers to Plan Early for Holiday Season

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Retail companies typically start planning and testing in August and freeze code in September, but — according to a new survey commissioned by Catchpoint — due to COVID-19, most respondents (58%) are starting their planning and testing earlier than before.

The survey Catchpoint shows that 97% of respondents report experiencing moderately to extremely higher peak traffic during the holidays, with their biggest Black Friday pains including slow page loads, higher bounce rates and bottlenecks in the revenue stream.

The hot issues for upstream and downstream partners include unavailable hot items, stock-outs, longer replenishment periods and longer shipping windows for customers.

These concerns are validated by Caila Schwartz, Senior Industry Strategist at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, in a recent Salesforce blog, "COVID will set a new precedent in ecommerce penetration: We predict that up to 30% of global retail sales will be made through digital channels this upcoming holiday season."

Ecommerce sales in May 2020 alone were higher than retail sales for the entire 2019 holiday shopping season

Schwartz continues: "When we launched our Q1 Shopping Index in April, we predicted that the digital surges we saw in March and April would likely continue as we headed into the summer. When we released our Q2 Shopping Index earlier this month, that prediction turned out to be correct. In Q2 of this year, global digital revenues grew by an unprecedented 71% over the same period in 2019. Consumer spending via digital channels increased even as brick and mortar locations began to open their doors again in the back half of Q2. As recently as June 1st, 61% of consumers reported that they were shopping in brick and mortar stores less often than usual. At the same time, over 50% of consumers reported record levels of digital engagement, saying that they were browsing the internet, shopping, and streaming content more than they normally would."

Adobe Analytics corroborates these expectations with the Adobe Digital Economy Index report for May 2020, finding that ecommerce sales in May 2020 alone were higher than retail sales for the entire 2019 holiday shopping season.

“COVID-19 has changed business forever,” says John Copeland, VP of Customer and Marketing Insights at Adobe. “We think that over the next couple of months we will see an even bigger focus on experience-driven e-commerce, as the competition heats up where consumers are now putting so much of their attention online.”

According to The Retailer’s Guide to E-Commerce Holiday Sales, 2020 Edition from Splitit: Social Distancing and "Stay at Home” requirements to battle COVID-19 have hugely influenced ecommerce sales in general and will impact Holiday shopping in particular. The report also warns: "Your site should load fast. Every second your page fails to load decreases conversion rates by 20%."

Schwartz from Salesforce concludes: "We believe many retailers will transform their stores to be more optimized for fulfillment rather than shopping this Holiday season (more on that prediction later), pushing up the share of digital shopping, regardless of fulfillment choice, to an unprecedented high. The obvious impacts of a large digital channel are the anticipated record levels of digital traffic and orders. This is something that you should prepare for now by conducting load testing, and planning accordingly for unprecedented surges in digital activity."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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COVID-19 Prompts Retailers to Plan Early for Holiday Season

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Retail companies typically start planning and testing in August and freeze code in September, but — according to a new survey commissioned by Catchpoint — due to COVID-19, most respondents (58%) are starting their planning and testing earlier than before.

The survey Catchpoint shows that 97% of respondents report experiencing moderately to extremely higher peak traffic during the holidays, with their biggest Black Friday pains including slow page loads, higher bounce rates and bottlenecks in the revenue stream.

The hot issues for upstream and downstream partners include unavailable hot items, stock-outs, longer replenishment periods and longer shipping windows for customers.

These concerns are validated by Caila Schwartz, Senior Industry Strategist at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, in a recent Salesforce blog, "COVID will set a new precedent in ecommerce penetration: We predict that up to 30% of global retail sales will be made through digital channels this upcoming holiday season."

Ecommerce sales in May 2020 alone were higher than retail sales for the entire 2019 holiday shopping season

Schwartz continues: "When we launched our Q1 Shopping Index in April, we predicted that the digital surges we saw in March and April would likely continue as we headed into the summer. When we released our Q2 Shopping Index earlier this month, that prediction turned out to be correct. In Q2 of this year, global digital revenues grew by an unprecedented 71% over the same period in 2019. Consumer spending via digital channels increased even as brick and mortar locations began to open their doors again in the back half of Q2. As recently as June 1st, 61% of consumers reported that they were shopping in brick and mortar stores less often than usual. At the same time, over 50% of consumers reported record levels of digital engagement, saying that they were browsing the internet, shopping, and streaming content more than they normally would."

Adobe Analytics corroborates these expectations with the Adobe Digital Economy Index report for May 2020, finding that ecommerce sales in May 2020 alone were higher than retail sales for the entire 2019 holiday shopping season.

“COVID-19 has changed business forever,” says John Copeland, VP of Customer and Marketing Insights at Adobe. “We think that over the next couple of months we will see an even bigger focus on experience-driven e-commerce, as the competition heats up where consumers are now putting so much of their attention online.”

According to The Retailer’s Guide to E-Commerce Holiday Sales, 2020 Edition from Splitit: Social Distancing and "Stay at Home” requirements to battle COVID-19 have hugely influenced ecommerce sales in general and will impact Holiday shopping in particular. The report also warns: "Your site should load fast. Every second your page fails to load decreases conversion rates by 20%."

Schwartz from Salesforce concludes: "We believe many retailers will transform their stores to be more optimized for fulfillment rather than shopping this Holiday season (more on that prediction later), pushing up the share of digital shopping, regardless of fulfillment choice, to an unprecedented high. The obvious impacts of a large digital channel are the anticipated record levels of digital traffic and orders. This is something that you should prepare for now by conducting load testing, and planning accordingly for unprecedented surges in digital activity."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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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 ...

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