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Internet Disruptions Cost E-Commerce Retailers Millions Annually

Howard Beader
Catchpoint

Recent data from eMarketer projects that U.S. retail ecommerce sales will accelerate each year through 2027, reaching more than $1.7 trillion and comprising one-fifth of total retail sales. The great societal shift online is no longer an emerging trend, it's how we live, work and play.

Now that so much of our lives take place online, consumers have increasingly higher expectations about online experience. The consequences of poor experience are significant for e-commerce retailers, affecting sales, revenue, and stock price. New research conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Catchpoint shows that one cause of poor experiences are disruptions across the "Internet stack," including routers, firewalls, ISPs, DNS, CDNs, cloud services, website payment providers, and video hosting services — which are particularly costly for e-commerce retailers.

The survey found that nearly 40% of e-commerce retailers suffer customer-impacting disruptions, as many as 76 per month on average, and these can cost up to $1 million per month. Despite the frequency and costs of disruption, however, many e-commerce retailers have been slow to adopt new solutions to proactively reduce or eliminate instances and increase their Internet resilience. Less than one-third of respondents in the survey monitor their full Internet stack today.

But the winds are shifting, with more e-commerce retailers adopting new technologies to gain visibility outside their traditional network infrastructure. 61% of survey respondents say they require tools to anticipate, detect, and fix Internet performance problems quickly, indicating a need for better management of Internet performance.

While monitoring the entire Internet stack isn't easy, with thousands of blind spots dispersed geographically that could become disruptions or affect experience, doing nothing isn't an option. This is precisely why adoption of Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), which provides those capabilities e-commerce retailers say is missing, is growing.

The survey findings make a strong case for IPM, quantifying the consequences of not closely monitoring all aspects of a customer's experience and addressing issues before they happen. With so much at stake, from slow site loading to abandoned shopping carts, there must be zero tolerance for disruption. And this starts with proactive monitoring that anticipates problems instead of reporting on them retrospectively.

As I've written before, the Internet is your new network, and if you're an e-commerce retailer — or any company for that matter, Internet resiliency is critical to the quality and consistency of your digital experience. Our survey shows that e-commerce retailers acknowledge the importance of proactively monitoring the Internet stack, and this industry pivot is certainly a hopeful sign.

Howard Beader is VP of Product Marketing at Catchpoint

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Internet Disruptions Cost E-Commerce Retailers Millions Annually

Howard Beader
Catchpoint

Recent data from eMarketer projects that U.S. retail ecommerce sales will accelerate each year through 2027, reaching more than $1.7 trillion and comprising one-fifth of total retail sales. The great societal shift online is no longer an emerging trend, it's how we live, work and play.

Now that so much of our lives take place online, consumers have increasingly higher expectations about online experience. The consequences of poor experience are significant for e-commerce retailers, affecting sales, revenue, and stock price. New research conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Catchpoint shows that one cause of poor experiences are disruptions across the "Internet stack," including routers, firewalls, ISPs, DNS, CDNs, cloud services, website payment providers, and video hosting services — which are particularly costly for e-commerce retailers.

The survey found that nearly 40% of e-commerce retailers suffer customer-impacting disruptions, as many as 76 per month on average, and these can cost up to $1 million per month. Despite the frequency and costs of disruption, however, many e-commerce retailers have been slow to adopt new solutions to proactively reduce or eliminate instances and increase their Internet resilience. Less than one-third of respondents in the survey monitor their full Internet stack today.

But the winds are shifting, with more e-commerce retailers adopting new technologies to gain visibility outside their traditional network infrastructure. 61% of survey respondents say they require tools to anticipate, detect, and fix Internet performance problems quickly, indicating a need for better management of Internet performance.

While monitoring the entire Internet stack isn't easy, with thousands of blind spots dispersed geographically that could become disruptions or affect experience, doing nothing isn't an option. This is precisely why adoption of Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), which provides those capabilities e-commerce retailers say is missing, is growing.

The survey findings make a strong case for IPM, quantifying the consequences of not closely monitoring all aspects of a customer's experience and addressing issues before they happen. With so much at stake, from slow site loading to abandoned shopping carts, there must be zero tolerance for disruption. And this starts with proactive monitoring that anticipates problems instead of reporting on them retrospectively.

As I've written before, the Internet is your new network, and if you're an e-commerce retailer — or any company for that matter, Internet resiliency is critical to the quality and consistency of your digital experience. Our survey shows that e-commerce retailers acknowledge the importance of proactively monitoring the Internet stack, and this industry pivot is certainly a hopeful sign.

Howard Beader is VP of Product Marketing at Catchpoint

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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