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.
You can review the entire findings of the survey HERE. You can also learn more about the benefits of IPM by watching the Increase Revenue through Internet Resilience Webinar.
The Latest
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...
The only way for companies to stay competitive is to modernize applications, yet there's no denying that bringing apps into the modern era can be challenging ... Let's look at a few ways to modernize applications and consider what new obstacles and opportunities 2023 presents ...
As online penetration grows, retailers' profits are shrinking — with the cost of serving customers anytime, anywhere, at any speed not bringing in enough topline growth to best monetize even existing investments in technology, systems, infrastructure, and people, let alone new investments, according to Digital-First Retail: Turning Profit Destruction into Customer and Shareholder Value, a new report from AlixPartners and World Retail Congress ...