Are your customers shopping on a mobile device this holiday season? The National Retail Federation predicts that spending via mobile is going to increase 4.1 percent this year, compared to a 3.1 percent increase last year. Beyond that, IBM predicts mobile devices to be the online shopping portal for over 53 percent of all purchases made. This upcoming 2014 holiday season is going to have consumers looking to spend more and using their mobile device to do so.

What enables mobile to become the device of choice to make the holiday shopping?

The key for retail success is providing highly targeted offerings in a smooth and sophisticated manner. When a buyer is shopping via a mobile device, it reveals new insights (time, location, who they are with and what they are buying) that can be combined with their past behavioral preferences. This knowledge gives retailers the power to build an optimized vision of the buyer and their interest, driving more relevant offerings to the customer.

With that power, comes risk; in return for an optimized and targeted experience, younger shoppers tend to regress their privacy concerns. Upon experiencing a poorly targeted offering, buyers will revoke the retailer’s rights to their context. Retailers not only need to present the right offering to the user, but must also create a mobile application that performs flawlessly through a single user’s journey this shopping season.

For a successful mobile shopping season, retailers need to look at two key initiatives on performance and availability of their applications:

■ Production Readiness Assurance: Leveraging agile methodologies will provide daily insight into the performance of the application in development stages. This way, no surprises will happen on the day of deployment. Proactive monitoring removes the dependency on real users and allows monitoring of the next version in development. Further, feeding production KPIs into the requirement set will ensure informed design decisions are made in the context of impact on user experience.

■ Proactive UX-Oriented Monitoring: Retailers need to identify the key business process for this shopping season, and identify the key devices, carriers and geographies. They need to leverage a proactive monitoring solution to examine the performance of the user flows frequently, set thresholds and tune alerts so the appropriate teams are informed and have the information they need to address any incidents. The key here is to be informed and active before many users are impacted and get vocal with their network on social media.

There is no surprise that shopping stats this year will outgrow any previous years, in part due to the compelling shopping experience mobile devices can offer. With many competing deals it is critical to maintain user engagement throughout the experience by offering a compelling journey that performs impeccably.

Amir Rozenberg is Director of Product Management for Perfecto Mobile.