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Online Retailers Should Prepare for "Mother's Me Week"

SOASTA Warns 40% of Moms Have Been Disappointed On Mother's Day
Ann Ruckstuhl

The “Mother's Me Week” Study discovered that 40 percent of US moms have been disappointed on Mother’s Day, and half of American moms would buy themselves a gift if they were disappointed on Mother’s Day, with nearly 1 in 5 doing so on Mother’s Day (16%), 14 percent the Monday after, and 14 percent the week after.

SOASTA commissioned the online research, conducted by Harris Poll, to alert retailers about the need for continuous testing and performance analytics for their online stores to ensure a quality user experience – whether it’s for key shopping events like Mother’s Day or new emerging shopping trends like Mother’s Me Week.

Over 1 in 10 American moms (12 percent) said problems with gifts caused them to be disappointed with Mother’s Day, including:

· I had to buy my own gift - 5 percent

· I could tell the gift was bought at the last minute – 5 percent

· Gift wasn’t thoughtful – 5 percent

· Gift was something I needed instead of something I wanted - 3 percent

Moms listed other reasons they were disappointed for Mother’s Day, including: “I wasn’t recognized at all” (12 percent); I had to do housework (10 percent); Spouse/partner only cared about their own mom not me (9 percent); kids didn’t acknowledge it properly (9 percent); the attention felt forced/obligatory (8 percent); Mother’s Day didn’t last the whole day – just a few minutes (7 percent); and family fights (5 percent).

Nearly one in two moms (45 percent) said they would buy something online immediately to improve their mood if they were disappointed on Mother’s Day, including: shoes (13 percent); tickets to a movie/theater/concert (13 percent); massage appointment (12 percent); jewelry (12 percent); purse (10 percent); going out clothes (10 percent); and makeup (10 percent). The choices with the least interest were “better husband” (4 percent) and “better children” (2 percent).

“We’re hoping both families and stores take our Mother’s Day warning to heart,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. “Everyone should make Mother’s Day special. If families don’t do their part, then stores need to ensure that disappointed moms can count on a quality retail therapy experience that only comes with continuous testing and performance analytics.”

Survey Methodology: This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll on behalf of SOASTA from April 27 - 29, 2015 among 680 American moms ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

Ann Ruckstuhl is CMO of SOASTA.

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Online Retailers Should Prepare for "Mother's Me Week"

SOASTA Warns 40% of Moms Have Been Disappointed On Mother's Day
Ann Ruckstuhl

The “Mother's Me Week” Study discovered that 40 percent of US moms have been disappointed on Mother’s Day, and half of American moms would buy themselves a gift if they were disappointed on Mother’s Day, with nearly 1 in 5 doing so on Mother’s Day (16%), 14 percent the Monday after, and 14 percent the week after.

SOASTA commissioned the online research, conducted by Harris Poll, to alert retailers about the need for continuous testing and performance analytics for their online stores to ensure a quality user experience – whether it’s for key shopping events like Mother’s Day or new emerging shopping trends like Mother’s Me Week.

Over 1 in 10 American moms (12 percent) said problems with gifts caused them to be disappointed with Mother’s Day, including:

· I had to buy my own gift - 5 percent

· I could tell the gift was bought at the last minute – 5 percent

· Gift wasn’t thoughtful – 5 percent

· Gift was something I needed instead of something I wanted - 3 percent

Moms listed other reasons they were disappointed for Mother’s Day, including: “I wasn’t recognized at all” (12 percent); I had to do housework (10 percent); Spouse/partner only cared about their own mom not me (9 percent); kids didn’t acknowledge it properly (9 percent); the attention felt forced/obligatory (8 percent); Mother’s Day didn’t last the whole day – just a few minutes (7 percent); and family fights (5 percent).

Nearly one in two moms (45 percent) said they would buy something online immediately to improve their mood if they were disappointed on Mother’s Day, including: shoes (13 percent); tickets to a movie/theater/concert (13 percent); massage appointment (12 percent); jewelry (12 percent); purse (10 percent); going out clothes (10 percent); and makeup (10 percent). The choices with the least interest were “better husband” (4 percent) and “better children” (2 percent).

“We’re hoping both families and stores take our Mother’s Day warning to heart,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. “Everyone should make Mother’s Day special. If families don’t do their part, then stores need to ensure that disappointed moms can count on a quality retail therapy experience that only comes with continuous testing and performance analytics.”

Survey Methodology: This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll on behalf of SOASTA from April 27 - 29, 2015 among 680 American moms ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

Ann Ruckstuhl is CMO of SOASTA.

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The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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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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 ...