Sales season 2024 is here: optimize your eCommerce experience
One of the biggest factors in determining a won or a lost conversion is your digital customer experience. While global retail ecommerce sales are predicted to hit $6.33 trillion in 2024 — an uptick of 8.76% year-over-year — the average cart abandonment rate sits at a little over 70%.
To minimize lost opportunities, you must proactively optimize every step of your user journey. And never is this more important than during the buying sprees at the year’s end, when consumers are looking to spend for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and seasonal sales.
By continuously simulating real user interactions with your websites and web applications, synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) helps you spot and fix issues before they cause friction that leads to abandon carts.
The benefits of multi-step transaction and API monitoring
Throughout key buying periods, there’s a significant risk of performance bottlenecks due to traffic surges and increased user interactions. You need to be confident that your web services on both mobile and desktop are ready to handle the demand.
Everything from login and account management to shopping carts and order fulfilment must function as expected. Otherwise, your customers will feel frustrated and potentially purchase from a competitor. Using STM to monitor performance during load testing lets you see the potential impact of high traffic volumes, login attempts, purchase activity, and more.
STM consolidates your monitoring metrics into easy-to-understand dashboards, helping you clearly visualize performance, control multi-vendor/multi-domain environments, and inform optimizations. This lets you preemptively address issues that affect web service responsiveness and functionality across platforms, such as by:
Optimizing load balancing and traffic spikes
Your business is about to launch a sale. You know that’ll drive a significant increase in traffic, which can overwhelm your systems if not carefully balanced. While load balancing is always essential, demand spikes during sales often outpace expectations, presenting the risk of latency issues and downtime.
To tackle this, you must make sure load balancers are configured to handle peak traffic. You must also review your traffic routing policies and scaling rules. Using synthetic monitoring to check load balancers, traffic routing paths, and geolocation response times allows you to proactively pinpoint anomalies and investigate any single point of failure.
Critical to this process is location-based monitoring, which helps you accurately simulate user journeys in your key markets. As a result, you can avoid geo-specific bottlenecks and deliver reliable user journeys across regions.
Fine-tuning content delivery network (CDN) and edge caching
Another tactic to cater for your global customer base includes ensuring your site assets load swiftly regardless of users’ locations. Sales seasons amplify the need for this, especially as sites with a 1 second load time have a conversion rate 3x greater than sites with a 5 second load time.
By checking your CDN configuration, caching TTLs, and edge locations, you can optimize static and semi-static resources — for instance images, CSS, and JavaScript — for the highest demand periods.
Synthetic monitoring gives you visibility of CDN availability and latency from multiple global locations. This lets you rapidly and continually test assets at edge nodes, identifying issues with cache propagation, expired content, or slow regions. With actionable insights, you can fine-tune edge nodes and improve resilience during load surges.
Stress-testing APIs and third-party integrations
Your eCommerce workflows span payment processing, inventory management, shipping providers, and more. All of these depend on third-party services and the APIs that allow your web applications to talk to them. Any functionality issues can cause choke points in your user journey, which risks lost transactions, cart abandonment, or inconsistent digital experiences.
Load testing APIs informs how you collaborate with third-party vendors, so that you can work with them to confirm readiness and set up fallback mechanisms to mitigate any failures.
With multi-step API checks, you can validate each component, including authentication and data responses, and receive alerts on any discrepancies. This attention to detail means you have instant visibility and awareness of slowdowns or errors, letting you re-route traffic or take preventive measures to protect the user journey.
Revising alert thresholds and incident response protocols
Standard alert thresholds can result in excessive noise during high-traffic events, resulting in alert fatigue and missed critical incidents. During sales, alert configurations must be more sensitive to SLA-impacting events.
As such, you need to reassess alert thresholds, escalation protocols, and auto-scaling rules. A strong starting point is implementing dynamic alerting levels based on predictive analytics from last year’s holiday data.
With customizable alerting and incident response tools, you can create specific thresholds for high-demand periods and integrate these changes with existing incident management systems. This enables automated escalation when errors breach SLA thresholds, reducing the need for manual oversight and allowing your team to respond quickly to true high-priority issues.
Enhancing user journeys with synthetic monitoring
Sales shoppers engage in multi-step journeys — from product search to checkout to delivery — and any friction along this path can lead to cart abandonment.
Highly intuitive multi-step transaction monitoring lets you set up custom monitoring flows for the complete user journey in minutes. It helps you simulate load at key points such as search, product details, and checkout, surfacing bottlenecks before they impact users.
You can thereby visualize performance at each step and receive detailed reports on response times and issues. Consequently, you can preemptively resolve the cause of these issues and guarantee frictionless user journeys during peak demand.
STM plays a valuable role in optimizing the reliability of your digital customer experience. It allows you to detect and address technical issues caused by increased user interactions ahead of time, supporting customer satisfaction during high stakes buying periods.
ITRS Uptrends provides you with full visibility and control of your transaction journeys, anywhere and anytime, due to its user-friendly, low-code/no-code synthetic transaction recorder and API monitoring. Its deployment-free, self-serve capabilities and guided onboarding give you rapid time-to-value.
Want to see how intuitive STM helps maximize your conversion rates in today’s competitive eCommerce industry?