Delight your customers this Black Friday with Monitoring Insights
It’s that time of the year again and consumers are already searching for the best deals this Black Friday. Competition in retail is rife, and hence the pressure to perform too. For retailers, it’s not just about the best deal but also the ability to provide delightful user experience from the start of the user journey right to the order confirmation page.
Black Friday performance challenges
Retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 5.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecasted to grow by 56 percent over the next years, reaching about 8.1 trillion dollars by 2026 (Statista). A major proportion of this forecast will be realised on key shopping days including Black Friday, Cyber Monday and others. With offers revealed weeks before, consumers are highly active during these periods, placing strain on servers to perform whilst receiving higher demand.
Businesses that are unable to cope with this demand, put their profits, customer lifetime value and reputation at risk. Unsatisfactory website experiences directly impact brand reputation and have a compounding effect, negatively affecting customer advocacy. That said, how do you prepare your website against downtime, slowdowns, and load errors?
How Monitoring Insights mitigates performance issues
The answer is quite simple: If you aren't monitoring it, you will never know if it’s not working. Under load your website may be performing well for some web pages but not for others. This could really impact sales negatively when for example, the payment page has slow loading times. This is one of the many reasons why monitoring certain web pages remains critical to keep conversion & satisfaction levels high.
Eggplant's Monitoring Insights continuously monitors key pages and user journeys, acting like an early warning system, identifying issues before your website starts underperforming. Alerts can be set up for critical events and thresholds, such as deteriorating download speeds, server rejection, or server failure occurs. Check out this solution brief for a detailed overview of the solution.
Eggplant Monitoring Insights in action with one of Keysight customers during last year's Black Friday.
Monitoring is not just for Black Friday
Performance issues can occur at any time of the year, so it is important to ensure you maintain a watchful eye on the server estate. An effective monitoring solution aligned to your sever will alert you to any website issues throughout the year, enabling you to take prompt action. This is especially true for transient errors, such as when an object, infrequently, does not download potentially causing the web page to fail.
Here are some tips to maintain a high performing website:
- Plan for key events that will affect traffic levels
- Track critical user journeys.
- Continuously test the performance of your website to ensure a streamlined user experience.
- Maintain a real-time view of website performance using Monitoring Insights
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See Monitoring Insights for yourself
Find out how COOK increased their sales conversions by optimising their user experience using Eggplant's Monitoring Insights Capabilities. The most successful online retailers are not the ones that offer the best prices, but the ones that offer the best experience.
These are some helpful videos about our solution:
- Slow Load Times: What are they costing your business?
- Retailers Settle for Nothing Less Than a Stellar Customer Experience.
For more information about how Keysight solutions can test your environment with application and network traffic generators, visit our page on Synthetic Traffic Generators.
If you have any questions or want to connect with one of our website performance experts, please get in touch.