The Relationship Between Software Performance and Retail Success
These days, any digital performance issue becomes the equivalent of hanging up a ‘closed’ sign in the window of a brick-and-mortar store.
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Join For FreeAs customers’ demand for a convenient, seamless, and personalized digital shopping experience reaches critical mass, there’s been a magnifying focus on the technology underlying the entire process. Retailers everywhere are becoming customer-obsessed, investing in innovations such as omni-channel, IoT, and geo-fencing. What’s being overlooked, however, is the performance of these applications. The software applications providing the foundation for all these innovative features are absolutely critical to the success of every e-commerce company. Any digital performance issue becomes the equivalent of hanging up a ‘closed’ sign in the window of a brick-and-mortar store.
Software Performance is Critical for Retail Success
Design, combined with constant monitoring to ensure optimal performance are key building blocks that go into a successful digital selling environment. If anything goes wrong, even something minor, an e-commerce company risks the negative publicity and outcry on center stage. For example, Target suffered an outage on Cyber Monday in 2015, the biggest online retail day in the US. Apparently, the issue was caused because they anticipated the demand, and subsequent traffic for their “15% off everything” offer.
So, what exactly are the technical needs to ensure a successful e-commerce company?
We partnered with Retail Systems Research (RSR), to see how the right foundation technology can improve digital performance, and ultimately lead to happy customer experience.
Users have come to expect a fast and seamless experience. Any issue logging in, adding items to their cart, or checking out and they’ll likely go somewhere else to make the purchase. Therefore, e-commerce sites must adopt a zero-tolerance policy for any performance issues that will impact customer experience. You may be asking yourself, “how can I ensure an optimal experience for customers?” That’s exactly where having the right foundation of software performance, application intelligence, and performance monitoring come in.
Digital retailers must be able to see how any performance issue, no matter how small, can affect their user experience, and ultimately, their bottom line. Being proactive, combined with the analytical insights, will ultimately separate the good from the bad.
In the RSR report find out exactly which monitoring attributes you should look for to best suit your e-commerce application and set you up for success. These criteria include:
- How to isolate performance problems
- User behavior insight
- Which processes (login, search, etc.) are negatively affecting user experience
- Correlation of application performance metrics with business metrics
How to Incorporate Application Performance into Your Business Conversation
Most digital retail sites have substantially grown in functionality and design in the last few years. These added features, like responsive design, faster response time, induction of mobile apps, and several others adds a layer of complexity to the backend environment. It’s time for performance management to shift from being an “IT issue” to being a “business issue.”
Very few, if any, other technology initiatives are so directly tied to business success. If your site goes down not only does your bottom-line suffer, your brand suffers considerably online through social media and review sites. Given these high-stakes, application performance should be absolutely critical to your business execs.
The reliability and scalability of the digital channel offering is as integral to its value as feature and function. The good news is that performance management frameworks exist today that can help retailers be confident in their digital offering. Now is the time for retailers to bring application performance management and analytics into the discussion of their new digital offerings.
Topics:
performance,
performance and monitoring,
microservices
Published at DZone with permission of Kevin Goldberg, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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