Top 5 Causes of Performance Issues During Online Holiday Shopping Season
October 22, 2018

Mehdi Daoudi
Catchpoint

Share this

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just weeks away, Catchpoint has identified the top five technical items most likely to cause web or mobile shopping sites to perform poorly.

When an online retail site is unavailable on a big shopping day, it is essentially the same as shutting the doors of a physical store

Every Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend in the last decade has seen at least one major online retailer with web or mobile site outages or slowdowns. Memories of last year’s Black Friday problems, and Amazon’s Prime Day missteps this summer, should remind retailers that no company, big or small, is immune to interruptions or slowdowns in its sites’ digital experience.

Online retailers can learn from the mistakes of the past to optimally prepare and best position themselves for a smooth kick-off to the holidays.

The following elements are the most likely to cause slow load times or outages in the upcoming season:

1. Third Parties

These are site elements hosted by outside companies and beyond the direct control of the main site. One sluggish third-party component can slow down an entire web page. Example: in 2016 a high-end home goods retailer experienced very slow page load times intermittently on Black Friday due to problems with a third-party photo display service.

2. Regional View

If an online retailer monitors page load times only using national averages, it could be missing local or statewide performance problems. Example: in 2016 a major retailer experienced problems on its desktop site due to an ad tech provider, ultimately leading to ongoing site blackouts in Phoenix, starting early in the long holiday weekend.

3. Critical APIs

APIs are fundamental components of e-commerce sites, often supporting customer-facing, revenue-generating applications. Like third party services, popular APIs can come under major strain during peak traffic periods. If an API supporting payment options on a site breaks, an abandoned shopping cart will be the likely result.

4. Page Weight

One of the easiest ways to ensure faster load times is to make certain a site’s page weight (amount of data loaded into a shopper’s browser) isn’t too large. This is a technique large and small retailers often employ during peak traffic days, usually by eliminating excess images or graphics.

5. Server Scalability

The Amazon Prime Day outage was reported to be the simple result of overloaded servers. Load testing internal servers is one of the most straightforward, simple things one can do, as well as having additional servers on standby.

When an online retail site is unavailable on a big shopping day, it is essentially the same as shutting the doors of a physical store. And when your page load time slows, that’s the same as forcing a customer to stand in a long checkout line.

It’s important to remember that comprehensive monitoring from the end-user perspective is the definitive way to gain visibility into all the performance-impacting elements in the delivery chain, including those beyond one’s own firewall.

Mehdi Daoudi is CEO and Co-Founder of Catchpoint
Share this

The Latest

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...

November 05, 2024

The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps. To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience ...

November 04, 2024

Users have become digital hoarders, saving everything they handle, including outdated reports, duplicate files and irrelevant documents that make it difficult to find critical information, slowing down systems and productivity. In digital terms, they have simply shoved the mess off their desks and into the virtual storage bins ...

November 01, 2024

Today we could be witnessing the dawn of a new age in software development, transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is AI a gateway or a precipice? Is AI in software development transformative, just the latest helpful tool, or a bunch of hype? To help with this assessment, DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry to comment on how AI can support the SDLC. In this epic multi-part series to be posted over the next several weeks, DEVOPSdigest will explore the advantages and disadvantages; the current state of maturity and adoption; and how AI will impact the processes, the developers, and the future of software development ...

October 31, 2024

Half of all employees are using Shadow AI (i.e. non-company issued AI tools), according to a new report by Software AG ...

October 30, 2024

On their digital transformation journey, companies are migrating more workloads to the cloud, which can incur higher costs during the process due to the higher volume of cloud resources needed ... Here are four critical components of a cloud governance framework that can help keep cloud costs under control ...

October 29, 2024

Operational resilience is an organization's ability to predict, respond to, and prevent unplanned work to drive reliable customer experiences and protect revenue. This doesn't just apply to downtime; it also covers service degradation due to latency or other factors. But make no mistake — when things go sideways, the bottom line and the customer are impacted ...

October 28, 2024

Organizations continue to struggle to generate business value with AI. Despite increased investments in AI, only 34% of AI professionals feel fully equipped with the tools necessary to meet their organization's AI goals, according to The Unmet AI Needs Surveywas conducted by DataRobot ...

October 24, 2024

High-business-impact outages are costly, and a fast MTTx (mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR)) is crucial, with 62% of businesses reporting a loss of at least $1 million per hour of downtime ...