Maximizing eCommerce ROI: Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is part 2 of the 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.

Start with Part 1: Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

In the last post, we learned about the eCommerce opportunity, its spread across all industries and the nature of eCommerce ecosystem. In this blog post we will see the trends in eCommerce and how you can thrive in your business with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

Your Customers Are Getting Impatient

Because good things come to those who refuse to wait! Your customers don’t want to wait as your website takes more than a blink of an eye to load. They won’t forgive you for slower websites or ill-functional apps.

In a survey done by Internet Retailer the majority of Americans said: “ ..in a real shop, they would wait in line for no longer than 15 minutes. However, on the web, over 25% will abandon a webpage that takes more than 4 seconds to load.”

... 40% will abandon a webpage that takes more than three seconds to load. And when it comes to mobile apps, customers will move on if an action takes more than 300ms to complete. IBM holiday recap report found that the bounce rate is increasing and the conversion rate is decreasing. Over the past few years, we have seen the cart abandonment rate increase to 75% in 2015.

Early this year, Business Insider reported that $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in online shopping carts this year. And savvy eCommerce providers can recover about 63% of it.

What can a savvy eCommerce provider like you do to bring back your money?

See It as the Customer Sees It

The individual components of your eCommerce might be working well, but what happens when it all comes together? Proactively monitoring your web and mobile applications exactly as seen by the customers gives you a clear picture of user experience. Monitor actual user transactions and not just the components that support them. Be ready for whatever challenge your customers throw at you.

Tip: Monitor your web and mobile applications at the real browser level, where all the moving parts of the applications come together. Monitor from where your customers are or where they will be, taking into account the user experience.

Holiday Season is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Gone are the days when retail just worried about the peak demands during Black Friday. This fascinating report on last holiday season done by Custora revealed that Black Friday and Cyber Monday only generated 10% of the Holiday revenue. The rest, 90% was generated over the period of 58 days.


As eCommerce expands across all industries, the peak seasons change. As you go abroad, your peak seasons and times of operation change. Now your customers celebrate Chinese New Year or International Singles Day or Earth Day.

Tip: Don’t wait for your holiday or peak season to start monitoring and optimizing performance of your eCommerce offering. Continually monitor, understand and improve your applications for all expected and unexpected peak seasons.

Make Room for New Holidays

This year we saw a brand new holiday called Amazon Prime Day. Walmart immediately mocked Amazon about it and both eCommerce providers saw a peak in traffic. Amazon claimed that Prime Day was bigger than Black Friday 2014.


Was it successful or not is beyond the scope of this blogpost. But it was indeed a great example of performance testing in production. It may seem like a distant future for your industry but it’s closer than it appears. We believe that these "retailer specific" holidays will become the new normal going forward. This gives companies a chance to test their applications and the infrastructure that supports it in real time. So when the actual peak season comes, they can be better prepared.

Tip: Performance testing in production is here to stay. Not everyone has the resource strength of Amazon and Walmart but depending on your industry, customers and nature of business, you can execute some flavor of it and become the pioneer.

Read Part 3: Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

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

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Maximizing eCommerce ROI: Understanding the Latest Trends

Priyanka Tiwari
Learn more about SmartBear

This is part 2 of the 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.

Start with Part 1: Maximizing eCommerce ROI with Synthetic Monitoring

In the last post, we learned about the eCommerce opportunity, its spread across all industries and the nature of eCommerce ecosystem. In this blog post we will see the trends in eCommerce and how you can thrive in your business with the help of proactive performance monitoring.

Your Customers Are Getting Impatient

Because good things come to those who refuse to wait! Your customers don’t want to wait as your website takes more than a blink of an eye to load. They won’t forgive you for slower websites or ill-functional apps.

In a survey done by Internet Retailer the majority of Americans said: “ ..in a real shop, they would wait in line for no longer than 15 minutes. However, on the web, over 25% will abandon a webpage that takes more than 4 seconds to load.”

... 40% will abandon a webpage that takes more than three seconds to load. And when it comes to mobile apps, customers will move on if an action takes more than 300ms to complete. IBM holiday recap report found that the bounce rate is increasing and the conversion rate is decreasing. Over the past few years, we have seen the cart abandonment rate increase to 75% in 2015.

Early this year, Business Insider reported that $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in online shopping carts this year. And savvy eCommerce providers can recover about 63% of it.

What can a savvy eCommerce provider like you do to bring back your money?

See It as the Customer Sees It

The individual components of your eCommerce might be working well, but what happens when it all comes together? Proactively monitoring your web and mobile applications exactly as seen by the customers gives you a clear picture of user experience. Monitor actual user transactions and not just the components that support them. Be ready for whatever challenge your customers throw at you.

Tip: Monitor your web and mobile applications at the real browser level, where all the moving parts of the applications come together. Monitor from where your customers are or where they will be, taking into account the user experience.

Holiday Season is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Gone are the days when retail just worried about the peak demands during Black Friday. This fascinating report on last holiday season done by Custora revealed that Black Friday and Cyber Monday only generated 10% of the Holiday revenue. The rest, 90% was generated over the period of 58 days.


As eCommerce expands across all industries, the peak seasons change. As you go abroad, your peak seasons and times of operation change. Now your customers celebrate Chinese New Year or International Singles Day or Earth Day.

Tip: Don’t wait for your holiday or peak season to start monitoring and optimizing performance of your eCommerce offering. Continually monitor, understand and improve your applications for all expected and unexpected peak seasons.

Make Room for New Holidays

This year we saw a brand new holiday called Amazon Prime Day. Walmart immediately mocked Amazon about it and both eCommerce providers saw a peak in traffic. Amazon claimed that Prime Day was bigger than Black Friday 2014.


Was it successful or not is beyond the scope of this blogpost. But it was indeed a great example of performance testing in production. It may seem like a distant future for your industry but it’s closer than it appears. We believe that these "retailer specific" holidays will become the new normal going forward. This gives companies a chance to test their applications and the infrastructure that supports it in real time. So when the actual peak season comes, they can be better prepared.

Tip: Performance testing in production is here to stay. Not everyone has the resource strength of Amazon and Walmart but depending on your industry, customers and nature of business, you can execute some flavor of it and become the pioneer.

Read Part 3: Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

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

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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 ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...