The Performance Imperative to Ensure a Successful Holiday Shopping Season
It’s that time of the year when lights and decorations start appearing, and calendars have just a leaf to turn before being pulled down from the walls. 2022 is nearing its end, but that also means the biggest festivities of the year are all set to begin in just a few weeks. Over the years, the period leading into Thanksgiving and all the way into the dawn of the New Year has become the shopping season. Holiday shopping 2022 is right around the corner, and despite fears of recession looming, surveys show that nearly 55% of US respondents are gearing up with enough savings to celebrate holiday shopping after nearly two years of subdued spending due to the pandemic.
It is estimated that anywhere between USD 1.45 to USD 1.47 trillion will be spent on shopping by US consumers in the 3-month holiday season from November to January. But one of the biggest catches here is that approximately USD 264 billion of sales will be online courtesy of digital channels like mobile apps and e-commerce websites.
The Performance Imperative for Digital Channels
Over the last decade, eCommerce has grown into a significant part of the retail industry. In the initial days, marketplaces and startups dominated the sales charts, but eventually, all traditional retailers launched their own eCommerce divisions as apps started taking over. The trend accelerated during the pandemic, and today nearly every business, irrespective of its size, has an online store to cater to consumer demands and has introduced conveniences like home delivery.
As the holiday shopping season kicks in, businesses need to ensure that their digital channels match up to the expectations of consumers by not just having the right inventory and delivery mechanisms in place, but also ensuring that shoppers do not face any performance issues on their digital channels.
On this note, let us explore four ways in which businesses can ensure a seamless digital shopping experience this holiday season:
1. Align Personalization with Performance
Today, there is no need to educate retailers on the need to deliver personalized experiences to shoppers on their digital channels. However, most businesses make the mistake of focusing just on personalizing the recommendations or products on offer for customers. The true essence of personalization happens when the performance of the app or website is fine-tuned to meet the unique needs of each shopper. What’s the point of creating personalized options if the user finds herself burdened with slow-moving or stalled workflows?
A shopper may be using a mobile website rather than a dedicated app from a brand. It is important for the brand to offer a consistent experience on the mobile website that resonates with the one enjoyed by app users. In other words, businesses need to ensure that performance of their digital assets is aligned with the customer’s digital journey roadmap.
2. Eliminate Downtime
One of the biggest let down in modern digital experiences happens when a website or app suffers from downtime. Obviously, every minute in this season when the app isn’t up and running in the hands of customers is tied to lost revenue. The reasons could be many, but the point is businesses need to ensure that their digital assets are proactively monitored to spot any abnormalities in advance. All steps must be taken to prevent downtime and plans must be made to provide mitigation even when it is absolutely necessary to solve an issue.
3. Tracing and Resolving Issues Faster
It is quite possible that the applications developed by businesses may have erroneous characteristics that will start to appear only in the advanced stages of the user journey or when the application plays out on the user’s device. It could either be a technical error like for example a faulty JavaScript error or it could even be a defective service call via a busy API or it could be some unexplored challenge created due to specific characteristics of user devices.
Tracing the exact root cause of a problem, capturing the workflow that led to the issue, and notifying relevant engineering and quality teams to inspect, diagnose and rectify the problem should all happen at the earliest. Monitoring the experience of the Real User, be it of the app or the website is crucial to ensure the app performs in the real world. That’s because every second of downtime can cost the business dearly in a high-traffic peak season like the holidays.
4. Forecast Problems Accurately
Today, enterprise digital applications have sufficient data that is generated daily, which can be used as insights into how they behave. This behavioral data can then be further utilized to build predictive models that can rightly point out potential failure scenarios as users work their way through the app. Using these insights, businesses can fortify their technology, design, workflow, and supporting infrastructure and focus on improving the quality of service while ensuring adequate performance and scalability.
Wrapping Up
The holiday shopping season will be a pinnacle event for retail businesses as they look forward to gigantic spending trends after a gap of two years. Being prepared to meet the needs of today’s digital-savvy consumers will be key in getting the upper hand both in terms of sales revenue and brand loyalty. Therefore, businesses must ensure the optimal performance of their digital assets during the holiday season.
Enabling manual monitoring and diagnosis of performance issues across large digital channels will not yield a significant impact, especially during the high-traffic season. This is where appNeura can bring in a huge difference. With AI-enabled quality of service monitoring of app performance, we can empower your product engineers, architects, and managers to handle “scale” seamlessly. Sign up for a free trial.