e-Commerce Monitoring in 2014
The 2013 holiday shopping season brought-in a few surprises for Web developers and IT professionals in North America. For starters, growth of ecommerce revenue surpassed brick-and-mortar stores by far, and mobile shopping was a key driver and strong winner. If you missed it, check out our 2013 Holiday Shopping recap blog to get more insight.
Are you ready to boost your ecommerce revenue and become an IT super hero in 2014?
Here are 3 actionable tips and guidelines to take on today!
1. Proactively monitor BOTH Web desktop and mobile sites on a 24x7x365 basis
Why? Shopping is a multi-browser experience now, where consumers spend more retail Internet minutes on smartphones and tablets than on desktops and laptops. And we clearly saw the results of this shift over the long Thanksgiving weekend -a record 21% of all online shopping came via mobile devices, tablets and smartphones (Source: IBM). Therefore, if you are only monitoring desktop Websites –or worse yet, not monitoring your Website at all –you are exposing your organization to significant risks and leaving money on the tablet…we mean table.
2. Monitor all business-critical Web functions, including: search, catalog, shopping carts, product reviews, corporate pages and store locator functionality.
Why? Shopping is also a multi-channel experience, where shoppers research products, read reviews, and scout the Internet for the best deals using a hybrid approach: browsing online and completing purchases online or at the store. For example, holiday-related searches on mobile devices peaked on Thanksgiving evening and spiked again on Black Friday morning (Source: Google). Couple this with the fact that 70% of mobile searches are followed up by consumer action in one hour (Source: Bing), and you see that monitoring your shopping cart is a great starting point, but it is no longer enough. If any critical Website function that drives indirect revenue underperforms (e.g. product reviews, store locators, corporate pages, search functions or catalogs), Web and mobile shoppers will abandon you for your competitors, and they may never come back. Don’t let your revenue slip through an underperforming Website.
3. Focus on Web performance optimization for smaller resolution screen
Why? The mobile revolution reached a key milestone this past holiday season –for the first time ever, mobile shopping drove significant revenue and experienced astonishing growth, turning out to be instrumental to Q4 ecommerce success. Just compare revenue growth per shopping channel (Source: Monetate): tablets were the overwhelming #1 winner (74% growth), smartphones were number 2 (51% boost), and laptop/desktop sales grew but remained a distant #3 (40% growth). Pair this with recent estimates from IDC (cellphone and tablet ownership is set to surpass the PC market in 2014, and 87% of connected device sales will be tablets and smartphones by 2017) and you’ll realize that mobile is here to stay. Moreover, thinking strategically, mobile holds the key to ecommerce success long-term. Consequently, if you haven’t started any work on “responsive Website design” (to ensure that your Web pages adapt to all desktop, tablet and smartphone screen resolution) you should, and pronto! Your competitors are working hard in this area, and so should you. Otherwise you risk falling behind in a competitive marketplace, where it is very hard to regain market share and bounce back.
As always, periodically check out what is new with Site24x7 – our powerful and proactive Web performance monitoring delivered from the cloud as a service from the makers of ManageEngine.
Happy e-Commerce Monitoring and good luck in 2014!