Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is Part 1 of a multipart blog series explaining trends in eCommerce as a result of underlying trends in technology and how ecommerce providers can maximize ROI with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

eCommerce is growing at 17% per year. Last year, the US holiday season rang up more than $600 billion dollars in revenue, and online and eCommerce generated $102 billion of that. But unfortunately eCommerce is stereotyped as an online version of the retail industry. It is much more than that. In 2013 Gartner produced a report laying out various industries by their eCommerce potential. Retail, wholesale, travel and entertainment made it to the top. No surprises there. But some were surprised by seeing traditional industries such as mining, agriculture, government, education etc. on there.


A lot has changed in the past two years; the not so eCommerce-y industries have come a long way in terms of online presence. Those who don't provide online shopping see the offline sales are being influenced by the online presence. We've seen feed manufacturers, steel distributors, and even utility providers using eCommerce to expand the geographical reach. Automotive and aerospace go the eCommerce way in the aftermarkets. All things said, eCommerce is relevant across all industries and it's growing at an exponential rate.

Everyone who provides eCommerce understands the significance of website or mobile application performance and how it directly hits the bottom line. And those who are new to eCommerce have started realizing the monetary consequences of page loads and bounce rates. When Amazon was down in 2013, they lost more than $60K per minute. BestBuy faced a huge social media backlash when shoppers couldn't use Bestbuy.com during holiday season. On the flip side:

"By reducing page load time to 1.2 seconds from whopping (!) 6 seconds, Shopzilla saw 12% increase in revenue"

"AutoAnything.com increased conversion rates by 9% by cutting down the load time by half."

You get it; poor eCommerce performance directly hits your bottom line. No matter what industry you are in, you should be monitoring your websites, web applications and mobile applications to ensure that your customers and end users can do what they wish to do.

Poor eCommerce is no different than going to a physical store, and seeing that it's closed or only few checkout lanes are open and there is a huge line. What do you do if it takes too long? You switch the lanes or you go to a different shop. That other lane in the eCommerce world is a different website, a different eCommerce store, maybe a competitor.

eCommerce Ecosystem

Modern eCommerce heavily relies on external and third-party components for critical functionalities such as search, cart and payment etc. And how can we forget the online advertising and social media plugins that bring traffic? Last holiday season, more than 30% of eCommerce traffic was routed by social media plugins. Companies that provide the following important eCommerce functionalities via plugins, APIs, applications or tools are important players in the eCommerce ecosystem.


If your company is part of the eCommerce ecosystem, the enormity of the eCommerce opportunity and growth applies to you! Google maps, PayPal, Elasticsearch, Evernote, Flickr get more than billion calls every day. Expedia quoted that 90% of its revenue comes from API business. In 2013, Salesforce generated 50% of its $3B revenue via APIs. Let's say you are the provider of payment processing API. It is your responsibility to ensure that your API is available 24x7, performing per your consumer's requirements and is returning right data at the right places. A poor performing API slows down the adoption, results in poor rating and reduced brand equity, finally reducing revenue.

As an eCommerce provider or part of the eCommerce ecosystem, you can leverage the entirety of eCommerce opportunity with proactive monitoring.

In the upcoming parts of this blog series, we will cover the trends in eCommerce as a result of trends in technology, the special case of peak season and how you can maximize the eCommerce ROI with proactive performance monitoring.

Read Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari is Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

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Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is Part 1 of a multipart blog series explaining trends in eCommerce as a result of underlying trends in technology and how ecommerce providers can maximize ROI with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

eCommerce is growing at 17% per year. Last year, the US holiday season rang up more than $600 billion dollars in revenue, and online and eCommerce generated $102 billion of that. But unfortunately eCommerce is stereotyped as an online version of the retail industry. It is much more than that. In 2013 Gartner produced a report laying out various industries by their eCommerce potential. Retail, wholesale, travel and entertainment made it to the top. No surprises there. But some were surprised by seeing traditional industries such as mining, agriculture, government, education etc. on there.


A lot has changed in the past two years; the not so eCommerce-y industries have come a long way in terms of online presence. Those who don't provide online shopping see the offline sales are being influenced by the online presence. We've seen feed manufacturers, steel distributors, and even utility providers using eCommerce to expand the geographical reach. Automotive and aerospace go the eCommerce way in the aftermarkets. All things said, eCommerce is relevant across all industries and it's growing at an exponential rate.

Everyone who provides eCommerce understands the significance of website or mobile application performance and how it directly hits the bottom line. And those who are new to eCommerce have started realizing the monetary consequences of page loads and bounce rates. When Amazon was down in 2013, they lost more than $60K per minute. BestBuy faced a huge social media backlash when shoppers couldn't use Bestbuy.com during holiday season. On the flip side:

"By reducing page load time to 1.2 seconds from whopping (!) 6 seconds, Shopzilla saw 12% increase in revenue"

"AutoAnything.com increased conversion rates by 9% by cutting down the load time by half."

You get it; poor eCommerce performance directly hits your bottom line. No matter what industry you are in, you should be monitoring your websites, web applications and mobile applications to ensure that your customers and end users can do what they wish to do.

Poor eCommerce is no different than going to a physical store, and seeing that it's closed or only few checkout lanes are open and there is a huge line. What do you do if it takes too long? You switch the lanes or you go to a different shop. That other lane in the eCommerce world is a different website, a different eCommerce store, maybe a competitor.

eCommerce Ecosystem

Modern eCommerce heavily relies on external and third-party components for critical functionalities such as search, cart and payment etc. And how can we forget the online advertising and social media plugins that bring traffic? Last holiday season, more than 30% of eCommerce traffic was routed by social media plugins. Companies that provide the following important eCommerce functionalities via plugins, APIs, applications or tools are important players in the eCommerce ecosystem.


If your company is part of the eCommerce ecosystem, the enormity of the eCommerce opportunity and growth applies to you! Google maps, PayPal, Elasticsearch, Evernote, Flickr get more than billion calls every day. Expedia quoted that 90% of its revenue comes from API business. In 2013, Salesforce generated 50% of its $3B revenue via APIs. Let's say you are the provider of payment processing API. It is your responsibility to ensure that your API is available 24x7, performing per your consumer's requirements and is returning right data at the right places. A poor performing API slows down the adoption, results in poor rating and reduced brand equity, finally reducing revenue.

As an eCommerce provider or part of the eCommerce ecosystem, you can leverage the entirety of eCommerce opportunity with proactive monitoring.

In the upcoming parts of this blog series, we will cover the trends in eCommerce as a result of trends in technology, the special case of peak season and how you can maximize the eCommerce ROI with proactive performance monitoring.

Read Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari is Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

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 ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

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 ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

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 ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

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 ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

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 ...

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Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

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 ...

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