How Ecommerce Businesses Fared During the Last Holiday Season
March 19, 2020
Share this

The 2019 State of E-Commerce Infrastructure Report, from Webscale, analyzes findings from a comprehensive survey of more than 450 ecommerce professionals regarding how their online stores performed during the 2019 holiday season.


Some key insights from the report include:

Revenue and Traffic

While only 34.9% of online merchants expected more than 2X their average monthly site traffic during the holiday season, 41.8% actually ended up at 2X or higher. These numbers become more significant given that more than 29% of online merchants generate almost 50% of their annual revenue during the fourth quarter.

Downtime

"Many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats"

24.3% of merchants experienced expensive downtime in excess of 5 minutes on Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2019, while 6.6% of storefronts crashed for more than 30 minutes. In our pre-holiday survey though, only 18.6% of merchants said that they were worried about impending downtime during the holiday shopping season.

Slowness

A pre-holiday survey revealed that 37.2% of online merchants were worried about slow page loads. However, 49.7% of them experienced page load times in excess of 3 seconds, 22.2% had page load times over 5 seconds, and 4.8% had intolerable page load speeds over 9 seconds.

Security issues

Last year, 21% of merchants admitted to experiencing cybersecurity-related incidents, ranging from DDoS attacks to credit card theft attempts, during the Cyber Weekend. This year, the number increased to 32.6%, a significant percentage of the hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites operating globally.

Hosting Challenges

12.9% of online merchants cited cyberthreats as their #1 challenge on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, 9.4% of merchants were plagued by downtime worries, and 8.9% stated site slowdowns were their biggest concern. Over 18% of respondents reported heavy struggles with all three challenges.

"While we saw some improvements this year, indicating that ecommerce merchants are investing more seriously in their site performance, many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats, finding it difficult to manage the infrastructure themselves, or working with providers who lack the depth of cloud expertise to deliver a superior user experience,” said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale.

Share this

The Latest

September 25, 2023

A long-running study of DevOps practices ... suggests that any historical gains in MTTR reduction have now plateaued. For years now, the time it takes to restore services has stayed about the same: less than a day for high performers but up to a week for middle-tier teams and up to a month for laggards. The fact that progress is flat despite big investments in people, tools and automation is a cause for concern ...

September 21, 2023

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds ...

September 20, 2023

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit ...

September 19, 2023

Customer loyalty is changing as retailers get increasingly competitive. More than 75% of consumers say they would end business with a company after a single bad customer experience. This means that just one price discrepancy, inventory mishap or checkout issue in a physical or digital store, could have customers running out to the next store that can provide them with better service. Retailers must be able to predict business outages in advance, and act proactively before an incident occurs, impacting customer experience ...

September 18, 2023
Digital transformation is key to ensuring companies keep up with the competitive market landscape. Putting digital at the core of a business can significantly reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies. However, this process often means changing the way internal teams work with one another. To help with the transition, this blog offers chief experience officers (CXOs) advice on how to lead a successful digital transformation project ...
September 14, 2023

Earlier this year, New Relic conducted a study on observability ... The 2023 Observability Forecast reveals observability's impact on the lives of technical professionals and businesses' bottom lines. Here are 10 key takeaways from the forecast ...

September 13, 2023
On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways ...
September 12, 2023

Only 33% of executives are "very confident" in their ability to operate in a public cloud environment, according to the 2023 State of CloudOps report from NetApp. This represents an increase from 2022 when only 21% reported feeling very confident ...

September 11, 2023

The majority of organizations across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) breached over the last year had personally identifiable information (PII) compromised, but most have not yet modified their data management policies, according to the Cybersecurity and PII Report from ManageEngine ...

September 07, 2023

A large majority of organizations employ more than one cloud automation solution, and this practice creates significant challenges that are resulting in delays and added costs for businesses, according to Why companies lose efficiency and compliance with cloud automation solutions from Broadcom ...