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For retailers and ecommerce store owners, your bottom line is always affected whenever your service is down, due to today's consumers expecting their digital interactions to operate around the clock. This is particularly crucial during spikes in traffic due to sales, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
As a result of these customer expectations and demands, if a customer feels they are not receiving the optimal shopping experience, they will take their business elsewhere without hesitation when services do not meet these expectations. This is evident by 40% of shoppers who won’t wait more than three seconds before abandoning an e-commerce website (Study: Forrester Consulting). In today's digital landscape, consumers expect prompt and seamless performance from digital storefronts. Therefore, IT teams need to be prepared to quickly address any outages or customer-facing issues that may occur.
This highlights the necessity for these organizations to invest in tools and solutions that maintain their existing customers' satisfaction and accelerate innovation to attract new ones. To gain complete visibility into their software and systems and enable these organizations to remain competitive whilst simultaneously guaranteeing the security of their services. Retailers and ecommerce website owners should incorporate an observability solution.
Within this article, we will outline what observability is, and include a range of the best use cases for observability in the retail and ecommerce industry. As well as, some advantages to these organizations of utilizing observability.
What is Observability?
Observability can be easily understood as the ability to comprehend and attain insights into the internal workings of a system by observing its outputs. The outputs that are observed, collected, and analyzed are a range of data from three main sources, logs, metrics, and traces. Monitoring data from these sources enables you to acquire complete visibility into your system or service.
What is an Observability Solution?
An observability solution can be described as an extensive set of tools, practices, and technologies designed to supply insights into the internal workings and performance of complex software systems. The main objective of an observability solution is to allow organizations to monitor, analyze, and comprehend the behavior of their systems in real-time.
How Observability Can Empower Retailers and Ecommerce Website Owners
By incorporating an observability solution into your ecommerce organization, you can ease the challenges that your organization is currently facing. To enable you to fully understand the broad range of uses that an observability solution can bring to these organizations, we have listed some of the best use cases for the tool.
Website Performance Monitoring
As stated at the beginning of this article, ensuring the availability and reliability of your website is crucial for retailers and ecommerce website owners. With an observability solution, you can guarantee a fast and responsive online shopping experience. This can be achieved by monitoring key website metrics such as page load times, transaction processing speeds, and server response times to identify and address performance bottlenecks. Carrying out this process will improve the user experience and increase the likelihood of returning customers as well as attract new ones.
This is because, with an observability solution, you can easily locate the services that are contributing to issues such as service lag and reduced speed, which if not resolved have been found to reduce revenue and significantly increase cart abandonments. This is seen by, 70% of consumers saying that page speed impacts their willingness to purchase from an online retailer. Therefore utilizing this tool will allow for quick resolutions when experiencing these issues, mitigating the impact on revenue and cart abandonments.
Enhanced User Experience
Utilizing an observability tool for an ecommerce organization will enable you to improve user experience via a variety of different uses and processes. One of these uses is to utilize dashboards to simulate customer interactions. Simulations can guarantee that digital customer features such as account creation or payment, perform as expected and enable you to mimic the activity of shoppers. From conducting this, you can identify where improvements can be made to enhance the user experience of your service.
Security and Fraud Detection
As the number of malicious attacks on ecommerce platforms continues to rise, it’s more important than ever that you can guarantee the security of your service. By adopting an observability solution you can protect your valuable customer data and ensure that you can detect fraudulent activities. This is simply achieved through monitoring security logs, detecting unusual activities, and responding promptly to potential security threats, safeguarding sensitive customer information.
Easily Adapt for Seasonal Peaks
Sales and promotions are a fundamental part of all ecommerce website owners and retailers, yet this brings increased traffic to your website which could affect performance if not managed correctly. By utilizing an observability solution you can guarantee that your website or platform is prepared for and can handle increased traffic during peak seasons or promotions. This is possible by executing capacity planning by monitoring resource usage, scaling infrastructure dynamically, and proactively addressing potential scalability problems to manage increased demand.
Increased Sales and Customer Satisfaction
With an observability tool, retail organizations can benefit from highlighting and rectifying performance issues promptly which will help to improve the user experience. Website performance is vital for ecommerce websites as 45% of online shoppers are less likely to make a purchase when a website loads slowly. Likewise, user experience is just as important as 64% of online shoppers will shop elsewhere if they have a poor user experience.
Therefore, improving website performance will lead to increased customer satisfaction, with fewer cart abandonments. Also, further enhancing your platform performance and meeting your customer’s needs through the utilization of customer data, will lead to more customers completing the checkout process.
Guarantee Compliance
Like all organizations ecommerce platforms and retailers must adhere to multiple compliance regulations and requirements. By incorporating an observability solution you will be able to monitor and audit for regulatory compliance. This will guarantee adherence to data protection regulations, protecting customer privacy, and maintaining legal compliance.
Continuous Improvement and Innovation
Finally, remaining relevant and competitive in an ever-changing industry such as ecommerce is particularly important. With an observability solution, you can begin to comprehend how your customers interact with different aspects of your platform. Then, with this data, you can highlight opportunities for innovation or areas that could be improved.
If you’ve enjoyed this article why not read APM vs Tracing vs Observability or our Beginners Guide to Observability next?