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Glitch-Filled Shopping Experiences Have Grave Consequences

Ami Sterling

The retail industry is highly competitive, and as retailers move online and into apps, tech factors play a deciding role in brand differentiation. According to a recent QualiTest survey, a lack of proper software testing — meaning glitches and bugs during the shopping experience — is one of the most critical factors in affecting consumer behavior and long-term business.

Not only do customers notice bugs and glitches, and may abandon entire purchases based on experiencing them, but they also think less positively about the brand and doubt the security of the brand's transactions — leading to lowered customer satisfaction, return rates, and lost revenue.

To put this in perspective, another recent survey found that of all US e-commerce sessions in the fourth quarter of 2015, 48 percent were returning visitor transactions. This vital statistic, along with the survey's other findings, highlights the importance of maximizing customer satisfaction and positive brand perceptions, and avoiding security doubts at all costs.

A separate QualiTest survey conducted recently revealed that 65 percent of consumers surveyed are likely to abandon a purchase due to bugs or glitches in the checkout process — whether purchasing on web, mobile web, or mobile app.

Moreover, even users who don't abandon a purchase notice the glitches. Nearly 55 percent of consumers reported experiencing technical difficulties during the billing/checkout process, and 41 percent of respondents said that bugs and glitches negatively affected their perception of the brand.

The survey further underscores the importance for retailers to make sure that they provide a seamless, smooth experience to customers, something which is not a choice, but an absolute necessity to build retail success, especially as online shopping continues to far eclipse in-store shopping.

Highlights of QualiTest's retail survey include:

■ Nearly 55 percent of consumers reported experiencing technical difficulties during the billing/checkout process.

■ 41 percent of respondents said that bugs and glitches negatively affected their perception of the brand.

■ The most common technical difficulty reported was a frozen page, which almost 60 percent reported, while 40 percent reported billing specific bugs.

■ 62 percent of all respondents said they would doubt the security of a transaction if a bug or glitch was experienced.

■ Majorities in every age group doubt the legitimacy of an online retailer when they experience a glitch.

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Glitch-Filled Shopping Experiences Have Grave Consequences

Ami Sterling

The retail industry is highly competitive, and as retailers move online and into apps, tech factors play a deciding role in brand differentiation. According to a recent QualiTest survey, a lack of proper software testing — meaning glitches and bugs during the shopping experience — is one of the most critical factors in affecting consumer behavior and long-term business.

Not only do customers notice bugs and glitches, and may abandon entire purchases based on experiencing them, but they also think less positively about the brand and doubt the security of the brand's transactions — leading to lowered customer satisfaction, return rates, and lost revenue.

To put this in perspective, another recent survey found that of all US e-commerce sessions in the fourth quarter of 2015, 48 percent were returning visitor transactions. This vital statistic, along with the survey's other findings, highlights the importance of maximizing customer satisfaction and positive brand perceptions, and avoiding security doubts at all costs.

A separate QualiTest survey conducted recently revealed that 65 percent of consumers surveyed are likely to abandon a purchase due to bugs or glitches in the checkout process — whether purchasing on web, mobile web, or mobile app.

Moreover, even users who don't abandon a purchase notice the glitches. Nearly 55 percent of consumers reported experiencing technical difficulties during the billing/checkout process, and 41 percent of respondents said that bugs and glitches negatively affected their perception of the brand.

The survey further underscores the importance for retailers to make sure that they provide a seamless, smooth experience to customers, something which is not a choice, but an absolute necessity to build retail success, especially as online shopping continues to far eclipse in-store shopping.

Highlights of QualiTest's retail survey include:

■ Nearly 55 percent of consumers reported experiencing technical difficulties during the billing/checkout process.

■ 41 percent of respondents said that bugs and glitches negatively affected their perception of the brand.

■ The most common technical difficulty reported was a frozen page, which almost 60 percent reported, while 40 percent reported billing specific bugs.

■ 62 percent of all respondents said they would doubt the security of a transaction if a bug or glitch was experienced.

■ Majorities in every age group doubt the legitimacy of an online retailer when they experience a glitch.

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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 ...