IT lessons learned from Prime Day

Millions of shoppers flooded Amazon.com on Prime Day in July — but the online shopping frenzy didn’t just benefit Amazon. In fact, shoppers spent $14.2 billion across e-commerce sites, up 11 percent from a year ago.

In the face of constant inflation, shoppers seek discounts and sales events attract consumer attention. However, any significant influx of traffic to the site can also cause disruptions in the retailer app (e.g., glitches or crashes), resulting in inventory management issues, operational delays, and significant revenue losses.

Looking at previous outages, major retailers like H&M, Best Buy, and Target struggled with their website performance issues during the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday sales in 2020. Additionally, in 2019, Costco’s e-commerce site was down for over 16 hours on Thanksgiving Day, while website outages in 2018 caused brands to lose over $100 million in revenue.

Learning from these (costly) lessons, many retailers have increased their IT infrastructure investments ahead of large online sales events. But incidents like the recent CrowdStrike outage show how widespread the effects of one or two critical system outages can be.

To prepare for the disruptions that are sure to occur during high-traffic e-commerce events, retailers must continually monitor their IT infrastructure to ensure network and application performance. Extending end-to-end visibility includes monitoring credit card authorizations, CRM systems, and even tracking inventory levels to ensure product availability. Continuous monitoring of critical retail application suite-level performance is essential for retailers to quickly triage and resolve issues to ensure high-quality, positive shopping experiences from browsing to delivery.

Planning ahead to manage peak traffic

A good first step for retailers looking to test and prepare their IT infrastructure for peak traffic events is to analyze historical patterns. Measuring predicted and actual bandwidth requirements and usage volumes during periods of high traffic involves analyzing historical packet data to predict traffic loads and comparing those predictions with real-time usage during peak hours. By understanding these metrics, IT teams can identify and mitigate potential bottlenecks, ensuring that the application is prepared to handle the influx of user traffic without disruption.

Retailers can manage traffic influx by integrating real-time analytics with proactive testing strategies. Testing network and application performance before, during, and after peak sales periods allows IT teams to continuously assess and maintain application quality. Additionally, simulating high-traffic scenarios can help identify and resolve potential network and application performance issues, such as high latency or failures. This type of testing can reveal the need to increase bandwidth, improve cloud resource availability, or readjust backend settings that are not scalable to handle peak traffic events. It can also indicate the need to expand observability to additional systems.

Boosting Website and App Performance During Shopping Holidays with Real-Time Monitoring

Online retailers rely heavily on the performance and availability of their mission-critical applications to run their day-to-day operations and ensure business continuity, especially when they experience high traffic volumes. In fact, 70 percent of consumers say page load times impact their willingness to make a purchase.

By analyzing network packet data at scale across web applications and connected systems, IT teams can monitor the performance of their IT infrastructure in real time. This gives them visibility into the entire retail application environment, from end users to back-end systems, including proxies, load balancers, databases, and web services. It also includes different parts of the retail ecosystem, such as contact centers, distribution centers, retail stores, and IoT devices.

These systems are designed to work together, so if one link in the chain becomes damaged or fails, retailers need to be able to quickly resolve performance issues, reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) before they escalate into larger issues or incidents that could lead to customer churn or reputation damage.

By monitoring shopper traffic, performing host analysis, and obtaining packages during specific online sales events, IT teams can gather information at the package level to analyze and better understand the cause of potential slowdowns. This knowledge allows them to make necessary changes to prevent future performance issues.

Preventing e-commerce performance issues with improved IT infrastructure

While Prime Day was a significant test for retailers’ e-commerce infrastructure, if historical traffic patterns continue to hold, the real challenge will come on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday. Previous holiday shopping cycles have proven overwhelming for retailers that underprepared their infrastructure.

While many leading retailers seem to have learned from past mistakes and invested in strategies to prevent total failures, even minor operational errors—such as credit card processing or inventory management—can negatively impact customer satisfaction and hinder a retailer’s success. With the holiday shopping season almost upon us, now is the time to invest in more monitoring and testing of the broader IT infrastructure that powers e-commerce sites. With the ability to see network and application performance, retailers can quickly troubleshoot potential issues to help customers stay on their sites and provide a seamless shopping experience.

Brooke Jameson is a senior manager of product and solution marketing at NETSCOUT, a user experience monitoring solution.