E-Commerce

February 21, 2017

Instapaper, a "read later" tool for saving web pages to read on other devices or offline, suffered an extensive outage 2 weeks ago. While Instapaper hit a unique problem — a file size limitation — its experience speaks to a much larger problem: scaling a database is difficult, and never quick. That basic fact explains why outages like this are surprisingly common ...

February 13, 2017

Forrester forecasted that direct online sales totaled 11.6 percent of total US retail sales in 2016, but digital touchpoints actually impacted an estimated 49 percent of total US retail sales, according to The State of Retailing Online 2017: Key Metrics, Business Objectives and Mobile report, released by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division and Forrester ...

February 08, 2017

Industrial and technological revolutions happen because new manufacturing systems or technologies make life easier, less expensive, more convenient, or more efficient. It's been that way in every epoch – but Continuity Software's new study indicates that in the cloud era, there's still work to be done ...

February 02, 2017

Traffic surges can happen when you least expect them. Political events can have a huge impact on people’s online behavior, as the ACLU’s website outage clearly demonstrates. Here are 7 tips that organizations like the ACLU can borrow from the retail world ...

January 10, 2017

There's nothing like a major web outage to remind us how much our applications rely on other web services and technologies to function. In late October of last year, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, one of the largest Domain Name Service (DNS) providers on the internet, disrupted service for consumer and business applications across the web. This attack shed light on the delicate interdependent nature of the web as productivity and uptime across the world was effected ...

January 05, 2017

For the holiday season, $63.1 billion was spent online on desktop computers, marking a 12-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

January 05, 2017

Apica highlights the following trends and predictions for 2017, covering the API Economy, ecommerce, analytics and more ...

December 30, 2016

Gartner revealed its top predictions for 2017 and beyond, examining three fundamental effects of continued digital innovation: experience and engagement, business innovation, and the secondary effects that result from increased digital capabilities ...

December 09, 2016

Cyber Monday, what seems to be a yearly ritual is continuing – online retailers know they're going to get hit with huge traffic, and still, there are site performance (speed, availability) disappointments. While 2013 to 2015 Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekends saw a few lengthy site outages by big-name retailers, 2016 has proven to be the year of mini-outages and slowdowns. Some were resolved quickly; others more slowly. Here are the key takeaways from this year's holiday season ...

December 07, 2016

comScore reported holiday season US retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the first 34 days of the November-December 2016 holiday season to date: $38.0 billion has been spent online, marking a 12-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

November 30, 2016

Almost one-third (28 percent) of customers will not return to a slow site, according to SOASTA's 2016 Holiday Retail Insights Report ...

November 29, 2016

Adobe released its 2016 online shopping data for Cyber Monday and the holiday weekend overall. Cyber Monday is on track to hit a new record with $3.39 billion spent online, a 10.2 percent increase year-over-year (YoY).

November 29, 2016

Black Friday. Retailers know it's coming every year, and still – every year – someone has a spectacular failure. This year Macy's gets top billing – asking customers to wait to shop. Since 500 milliseconds of web delay is estimated to cost 5% of revenue, how much can we guess Macy's lost by asking EVERY shopper, for hours, to wait to shop? It's clearly in the millions of dollars ...

November 28, 2016

Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the three-billion-dollar mark for the first time at $3.34 billion.

November 28, 2016

The most destructive root cause of 75 percent of outages during big online events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unplanned configuration changes to a system – when IT and Ops teams find something they think might cause a problem and try to fix it immediately, unintentionally creating a much bigger issue for the web or mobile site. The following are BigPanda's top recommendations for preventing outages during throughout the entire holiday shopping season ...

November 22, 2016

Consumers are eager to see the deals retailers will offer for the biggest shopping weekend of the year, with 59 percent of Americans – an estimated 137.4 million people – planning to or considering shopping during Thanksgiving weekend, according to the annual survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.

November 10, 2016

Companies with B2C and SaaS B2B models must ensure that their websites and web applications are fast. To improve the speed of your site or application, whether on your internal or external network, you must focus on three key metrics that will help lead you in the right direction to plan for or solve performance issues. In this final blog of the series, I finish up with the most important metric of all – the one visitors care about – response time ...

November 09, 2016

Companies with B2C and SaaS B2B models must ensure that their websites and web applications are fast. To improve the speed of your site or application, whether on your internal or external network, you must focus on three key metrics that will help lead you in the right direction to plan for or solve performance issues. In this blog, I discuss Metric #2: Number of Bytes Transferred ...

November 08, 2016

With the increased scrutiny on web performance by Google, companies with B2C and SaaS B2B models must ensure that their websites and web applications are fast. It's widely accepted that the time it takes a web page to load should be something closer to 1 second. It's at this time that users begin to notice if an interface is slow. Most users are gone by the time 10 seconds comes around. If your site or application relies on users buying what you're selling, those seconds can mean the difference between a visitor buying from you or your competitor. To improve the speed of your site or application, whether on your internal or external network, you must focus on three key metrics that will help lead you in the right direction to plan for or solve performance issues. In this blog I discuss Metric #1: Number of HTTP Requests ...

November 04, 2016

Consumer software is seen as more reliable than enterprise software, and that consumer grade is the new standard for apps today, according to ScaleArc's annual survey of IT decision makers.

September 13, 2016

On the first Sunday of the NFL season, ESPN's fantasy football app crashed. We see these types of stories often during so-called "surge" events, like when Black Friday takes down a retailer. Why? Often, it's the database that's been swamped in the process ...

September 06, 2016

Business leaders looking to improve the quality of their customers’ digital experience agree they do not know where to start, according to research published by Actual Experience ...

September 01, 2016

Do you know how much your organization risks with every potential outage? This infographic outlines the true cost of downtime ...

August 19, 2016

ScaleArc's Summer Blockbuster Survey found that 62 percent of Americans said they would be upset if they were purchasing movie tickets and the site or app went down, and 90 percent agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have no downtime this summer ...

August 12, 2016

One way top-tier e-commerce companies maintain their prestige and keep customers coming back is by delivering an exceptional customer experience. Users can depend on these sites for fast, reliable web interactions, and speedy and convenient transactions. Catchpoint just analyzed and ranked the top performing e-commerce companies and one thing is clear – they all make performance optimization a priority. The top three performers – Target, Apple and Walgreens – shared best practices that have allowed them to achieve their competitive edge ...

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