According to BIGresearch data, online retailers are expecting strong holiday sales, with nearly two-thirds of retailers anticipating their online sales to grow by at least 15 percent over last holiday season.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — “Cyber Monday” is known as the busiest online shopping day of the holiday season, however, prior to Halloween, e-commerce firms saw a glimpse of the online retail shopping volumes that will be in affect next month.
According to a blog post from Tim Callan, a product marketing executive for VeriSign’s SSL division, this so-called “e-Hallow’s Eve” is the day in which the most online transactions take place before October 31. Callan notes that e-Hallow’s Eve is significant, given that a quarter of consumers spend more on Halloween than any other non-gift giving holiday, totalling an estimated $5.8 billion.
Callan noted that e-Hallow’s Eve fell on October 25, when Symantec’s VeriSign seal was viewed by consumers on websites 250 million times – which is equal to the number recorded on last year’s Cyber Monday.
Given these high volumes of online shoppers, e-Hallow’s Eve should serve as a reminder for online retailers that they should prepare now to avoid Web performance issues on Cyber Monday, which is expected to fall on November 29.
In each of the previous two years, Cyber Monday spending in the US totaled well over $880 million, according to published reports in Fast Company and Computerworld, and online shopping is expected to increase from last year.
Web application performance management provider Coradiant (www.coradiant.com) has announced a list of best practices that IT professionals can implement to deal with the flood of traffic.
The company recommends retailers lock down all changes to code and infrastructure at least a month prior to the busy online shopping season. They should create automated baselines of normalcy before the traffic increase, enabling them to easily detect and notify IT at the first sign of website performance issues. In keeping with the last point, organizations must continuously measure end-user experience globally to detect response lags. And finally, they should isolate the cause of each problem quickly, and repair it before it snowballs into a larger issue.
“For CSN Stores, Web performance measured from the end-user perspective is the only way to gauge true shopping site performance,” said Steve Conine, chairman and co-founder of e-commerce company CSN Stores (www.csnstores.com), which operates 200 shopping sites. “For e-commerce vendors like us, competitors are just a click away. We’re able to measure – in real time – how long it takes consumers to interact with our shopping sites and check out items, so we can proactively detect problems that our customers experience before it impacts sales during the critical holiday season.”
Indeed, the growing complexity of Web deployment, which involves the interplay of rich applications, third-party applications, cloud delivery, changing virtualized infrastructure, and entangled middleware, makes the end user is the only stable point of reference.
“Taking the time to put a few preventative measures in place now can be the difference between a good and bad holiday season when the final receipts are tallied,” Coradiant president and chief operating officer Ali Hedayati said in a statement. “In addition, retailers should monitor their sites throughout the busy shopping season to maintain their performance for what is predicted to be a robust year for online shopping.”
No related posts.
