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Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 3 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

Start with Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Compete with Yourself First

eCommerce is ever-changing and so are the customers, who are the raison d'être of eCommerce. As you expand your offerings and start catering to different demographics, your competitive landscape becomes more complex. Now you are competition against the companies in your market as well as your historic self. Don't ignore your current and returning customers while running after the new ones. When a single second of page load delay and every instance of poor performance directly hits your bottom line, make baselining the first step of your performance optimization strategy.

Tip: Monitor in pre-production environment to baseline your performance. Compare that against your historic self and your competitor's performance.

Be Prepared for the Age of the Customer

In the Age of the Customer, your customers decide where and how they want to access your eCommerce platform. They select the browsers, the Internet service providers, the wireless networks and the physical devices on which they would access your website or the app. eMarketer did a fantastic report on trends in the world of Mobile eCommerce or m-commerce as they call it. Online shoppers love mobile but 37% hated the inconsistencies in user experience across various devices. Customers demand seamless experience across all the devices and platforms they use to access your eCommerce offering.

Tip: Monitor your eCommerce offering – Websites, web apps, mobile responsive web and native mobile app considering all diverse use cases: various locations, real devices, browsers, Internet providers and wireless networks.

Mobile Rocks but Web Still Matters

We all hear how mobile is taking over the world. It's the "Cloud first, Mobile first" world. In developing countries more people access the Internet from their mobile devices than the desktops. Per the IBM Holiday report, conversion rate and average value per order was higher for desktops than for mobile devices. Small screen devices browse, large screen devices buy!

Image removed.

India's largest eCommerce provider Flipkart announced that they will soon go only-app just like their newly acquired asset Myntra. The adoption and usage of the mobile phone varies across different geographies and industries. Personally, I would be far more comfortable buying a pair of shoes via my smartphone than filing my taxes or buying my health insurance. Mobile matters for some industries, but desktop is still relevant and prominent for others.

Mobile app users may be more forgiving about the load time, but they reportedly leave the app if an action doesn't complete in 300ms. Ensuring performance on diverse mobile devices running on various networks is challenging for the app providers. Customers who want to browse and research on smartphone, add items to cart on a tablet, and checkout on a desktop are not making this easy. That's why we see many companies opting for mobile responsive web. The pros and cons of mobile responsive web vs native app is a discussion for another time. But as m-commerce grows, the need for improving and maintaining mobile experience grows.

Tip: Understand the conversion paths for your eCommerce offering and bulletproof them. Strive for ultimate mobile experience without losing the focus on websites.

In the next post, I will conclude the blog series with understanding the significance of APIs in eCommerce and a final tip to measure and monitor the application performance.

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

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

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Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

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Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...

Maximizing eCommerce ROI in the Age of the Customer

Priyanka Tiwari

This is part 3 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

Start with Part 2: Maximizing eCommerce ROI - Understanding the Latest Trends

Compete with Yourself First

eCommerce is ever-changing and so are the customers, who are the raison d'être of eCommerce. As you expand your offerings and start catering to different demographics, your competitive landscape becomes more complex. Now you are competition against the companies in your market as well as your historic self. Don't ignore your current and returning customers while running after the new ones. When a single second of page load delay and every instance of poor performance directly hits your bottom line, make baselining the first step of your performance optimization strategy.

Tip: Monitor in pre-production environment to baseline your performance. Compare that against your historic self and your competitor's performance.

Be Prepared for the Age of the Customer

In the Age of the Customer, your customers decide where and how they want to access your eCommerce platform. They select the browsers, the Internet service providers, the wireless networks and the physical devices on which they would access your website or the app. eMarketer did a fantastic report on trends in the world of Mobile eCommerce or m-commerce as they call it. Online shoppers love mobile but 37% hated the inconsistencies in user experience across various devices. Customers demand seamless experience across all the devices and platforms they use to access your eCommerce offering.

Tip: Monitor your eCommerce offering – Websites, web apps, mobile responsive web and native mobile app considering all diverse use cases: various locations, real devices, browsers, Internet providers and wireless networks.

Mobile Rocks but Web Still Matters

We all hear how mobile is taking over the world. It's the "Cloud first, Mobile first" world. In developing countries more people access the Internet from their mobile devices than the desktops. Per the IBM Holiday report, conversion rate and average value per order was higher for desktops than for mobile devices. Small screen devices browse, large screen devices buy!

Image removed.

India's largest eCommerce provider Flipkart announced that they will soon go only-app just like their newly acquired asset Myntra. The adoption and usage of the mobile phone varies across different geographies and industries. Personally, I would be far more comfortable buying a pair of shoes via my smartphone than filing my taxes or buying my health insurance. Mobile matters for some industries, but desktop is still relevant and prominent for others.

Mobile app users may be more forgiving about the load time, but they reportedly leave the app if an action doesn't complete in 300ms. Ensuring performance on diverse mobile devices running on various networks is challenging for the app providers. Customers who want to browse and research on smartphone, add items to cart on a tablet, and checkout on a desktop are not making this easy. That's why we see many companies opting for mobile responsive web. The pros and cons of mobile responsive web vs native app is a discussion for another time. But as m-commerce grows, the need for improving and maintaining mobile experience grows.

Tip: Understand the conversion paths for your eCommerce offering and bulletproof them. Strive for ultimate mobile experience without losing the focus on websites.

In the next post, I will conclude the blog series with understanding the significance of APIs in eCommerce and a final tip to measure and monitor the application performance.

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

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

Image
Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...