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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
APM

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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
APM

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...