If you’re an online retailer or any organization with an e-commerce presence, the quality of your buyers’ online experience on Cyber Monday can make the difference between a sale and an abandoned shopping cart. The only way you can keep the transactions flowing is to be the first to know of your website's performance problems, well before your customers do.
Are You Ready for Cyber Monday?
Black Friday falls on the last Friday in November (the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.) and sees the largest number of shoppers rushing to brick and mortar retailers who offer very big discounts. A few days later on Cyber Monday, big sales dominate online stores just when workers arrive back at the office.
By the numbers:
- Last year Americans spent a record $3 billion dollars* shopping online on Cyber Monday, breaking the record set just three days before on Black Friday with $2.75 billion in online sales.
- In 2015, U.K. online shoppers spent twice as much as they did the year before on Cyber Monday, with sales up 139%**
- In France, Cyber Monday continues to climb in popularity with many items on sale for 50% or more
Needless to say, Cyber Monday could be the worst day for your online shop to experience issues that impact your buyer’s experience. Or even worse, for your website go down completely.
Related Article: 3 Tips to Brace Your Website and Network Against Cyber Monday
Perhaps you have network monitoring tools in place that would notify you as soon as your website is down. That's good, but you'll need something on top of that to keep your e-commerce experience running smoothly.
Modern day web applications are complex - your website can be up, but what if that little script, which integrates your web shop with a payment system, breaks? Your website may still be up, but you're still losing money.
Don’t wait for a customer to call or initiate an online chat. They may very well abandon their efforts and go to another site where they will spend their money instead.
Know What’s Wrong Before Your Customers Do
AlertFox from Ipswitch monitors the uptime and performance of your website, not just letting you know that it's available but also informing you if delays exist in different customer interaction points such as an e-commerce checkout, portal login, or rich internet app errors.
With AlertFox you can record a sequence of steps which reflect your customers' actions. And then AlertFox will replay them at set intervals from different regions across the globe.
Whether thousands of requests on a Cyber Monday make your webshop slower or a DDOS attack breaks the CDN where your shopping cart script is stored, AlertFox will inform you as soon as that happens.
AlertFox helps you to do the following:
- Monitor any website or web application: both your external customer-facing website and your business critical internal web apps.
- Deliver a great web experience: stay on top of your customer experience - view your web experience as your customers do.
- Verify simple and complex web transactions: know your visitors can interact with every aspect of your website.
AlertFox was specifically designed to help you with days like Cyber Monday so go ahead and get yourself a free 30-day trial.
If you'd like to connect with us to ask questions or request pricing, please send an email to [email protected].
*Source: Adobe
**Source: Ve Data