How can Internet Resilience help eCommerce players drive more revenue?

Catchpoint and ITOps Times have teamed up to break down 6 critical topics you need to understand to ensure Internet Resilience for your business in a bi-weekly microwebinar series, each lasting less than 10 minutes.

Explore each of the topics in the series:  

1. Why should you care about Internet Resilience?  

2. Introducing IPM: How does it help?

3. (This Post) How can Internet Resilience help eCommerce players drive more revenue?

4. How can companies improve Network and API performance?  

5. How can companies improve their employees’ digital experience?  

6. How can you improve conversions on your website?  

In this third installment, we’ll talk about why Internet Resilience is critical for retail and eCommerce companies.

Now, let’s get into the episode!  

How can Internet Resilience help eCommerce players drive more revenue?

Watch the live Q&A with Howard Beader, VP of Product Marketing, or read the video transcript below.

‍

Video Transcript

Dave Rubinstein

Hey, hello again, everyone, and welcome to Episode 3 in our ITOps Times live microwebinar series on Internet Performance Monitoring. I'm Dave Rubinstein, Editor in Chief of SD Times.  

And just to catch you up... in episode one, we spoke about Internet Resilience and noting its fragility and complexity, even as it's something that every organization today relies on. In episode two, we introduced the practice of Internet Performance Monitoring and how it can ensure you're delivering the best experiences to your customers.  

You can watch these past episodes on demand in the ITOps Times Learning Center under the Webinars tab, and today we'll look at how Internet Resilience can help ecommerce companies drive more revenue.  

With me is Howard Beader. He's a Vice President of Product Marketing at microwebinar series sponsor Catchpoint. Welcome Howard.  

Howard Beader

Hey, David, nice to be here.  

Dave Rubinstein

Yeah, good to have you. So, I know that Catchpoint recently did a survey with Forrester on eCommerce platforms and the problems that they can encounter. Let's dive into that study a little bit and maybe you can share with us some of the findings.  

Howard Beader

Yeah, happy to do so, David. First off, I've got to recognize today, right? It's an important day. It's Star Wars Day – May the Fourth be with you!

Let's start there and then let's jump in.  

We did this survey with Forrester where we targeted large ecommerce and retail organizations. We had over 262 respondents from folks that really are responsible for ecommerce strategy and a couple of things they said are that customers have an all-time low tolerance for any disrupted experience. And it's not just your customers, it's your workforce as well, because if your employees aren't happy, they're not going to make your customers happy. Both are important.

And what we ended up finding, which was really surprising, is that disruptions are really a daily occurrence for these organizations. And if you look across all of these different components, these components really make up what we talk about is the Internet Stack and these organizations are seeing 76 Internet disruptions a month.

It's a huge number. It's a huge number of issues that organizations really need to be addressing. They need to be fixing, they need to have teams supporting and in order to fix it, they really need to be able to identify it and identify it quickly.  

Dave Rubinstein

Hey, Howard, let me jump in with a question here and how do you define disruption? What qualifies as a disruption? Is it a slow response time to a button that you click on or an outage? How do you define it?

Howard Beader

It could be latency, it could be packet loss, it could be an outage. Any of a number of issues that are really causing these types of disruptions and these disruptions really end up affecting the flow of commerce.

Because what we found is that even a small disruption in the flow is going to cause customers to halt their purchase cycle. And this has a huge impact on these ecommerce and retail organizations. I mean, how many of us have been on any sort of website where you're trying to complete a purchase? It just doesn't work.

I can tell you a story where my wife was on a website and just kept trying to complete that purchase. She probably clicked it, I couldn't even tell you, 20 times to complete it to the point where it actually caused my debit card to actually get locked up by the bank because it couldn't process all the way through because of an issue on the site.  

Those issues are costing these organizations millions of dollars a month.  

Dave Rubinstein

Yeah, anecdotally we had the same thing here. My wife wanted to buy a pair of shoes online and was filling out the whole completion for the credit card and all that and hit send. Never got a confirmation. Thought something went wrong. Did it again. My bill shows up. I got billed 5 times for a pair of shoes.  

Howard Beader

Exactly, exactly. And then you've got to take the time to fight it. Or, in the worse case, you actually have to ship four boxes back, which nobody wants to do.  

But if you look at these numbers here, you're talking 90% of organizations. I mean this could end up costing them millions of dollars annually. This is lost revenue that they can easily get back by leveraging a platform like what we're offering here at Catchpoint with Internet Performance Monitoring.

We're covering a number of different solutions across the organization from customer experience to network to website to workforce to application to really be able to support these organizations, help them identify the issues as quickly as possible. Therefore, they can remediate it faster and get those customers' purchases completed.  

So that's the story.  

Dave Rubinstein

All right. So, talk a little bit about how the platform can help companies spot these problems before they become real bad problems.

Howard Beader

What we do is we have a very large network of vantage points where we have nodes throughout the globe. We run simulated tests from those nodes. So here in Boston, I leverage Xfinity or Comcast as my ISP.

Well, we have nodes in Comcast and as an organization, as a retail organization, I can run tests to Comcast every 5 minutes or less to ensure that the experience that I have is as I expected it to be for that organization. That enables the organization to identify issues before those issues impact their customers. Then once those issues are identified early and identified quickly, they can get on them to remediate and fix the issues.  

And because our platform has a signal intelligence capability, we're reducing the noise aspect. The alerts that they're getting are the right alerts at the right time to fix those issues quickly.  

Dave Rubinstein

Yeah, that's critically important. I hear about that. A lot of people just talking about noise, whether it's feedback noise or, you know, false negatives or false positives. Being able to sort through that saves a lot of time and energy to help mediate those issues. So that's fantastic. Good stuff.  

Howard Beader

Exactly. Awesome.

Dave Rubinstein

All right. So, Howard Beader, Vice President of Product Marketing at Catchpoint. Thanks so much for your time today.  

Howard Beader

Thank you. Yeah.  

Dave Rubinstein

And I would like to tell our audience to tune in again on May the 18th, where we'll be talking about how companies can improve their network and API performance with Leo Vasiliou of Catchpoint. He's the Director of Product Marketing as well. So until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Again, I'm Dave Rubinstein, Editor in Chief of ITOps Times. And so long for now. Thank you.