Risk and reward – application owners must be ready for unprecedented volumes of traffic this holiday season
By Gregg Ostrowski
It’s not long now until the holiday season battle commences in the retail sector, with brands competing for consumer share of wallet on key shopping dates such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other seasonal holidays. And this year, the fiercest competition is likely to happen online, with record numbers of shoppers favoring online shopping to find the very best deals and avoid time-consuming and stressful trips to the shops.
For online retailers, the potential rewards are massive. Application owners that can combine attractive prices with world class digital experiences have the opportunity to achieve record sales. At the same time, however, there are also severe risks for any brand whose applications and digital services falter under the strain of increased traffic and huge spikes in demand. Customers will turn their back on these retailers, possibly never to return.
This is the ‘risk-reward’ tightrope that application owners need to navigate over the coming weeks. And in order to come out on the right side, retail leaders will need to ensure that their IT teams have the tools and insights required to optimize application availability and performance at all times.
Consumer demand for online holiday shopping reaches record levels
At Cisco AppDynamics, we recently surveyed +12,000 global consumers to understand their attitudes and intentions around the holiday shopping season. The findings reveal the enormous opportunity that the next few weeks will present for retailers to attract new customers and boost sales.
We found that 43% of consumers intend to conduct more of their holiday shopping online this year compared to 2022, with just 13% planning to do less. And they also plan to spend 6% more of their overall holiday shopping budgets online rather than in physical stores.
There are a number of reasons for this change in consumer behavior. 48% of shoppers are going online as they feel this gives them the chance to seek out the very best deals and make their budgets stretch further. Some people are favoring online because they feel they can get a greater choice of products (42%), while others are simply looking to avoid last-minute panic buying in stores (31%) or because they’re time-poor (27%).
Digital experience will be critical for retailers to keep holiday shoppers happy
The potential rewards for retailers from this shift towards online shopping are obvious. But retail leaders need to recognize that there are also heightened risks. Increased volumes of traffic and huge fluctuations in demand will place applications and supporting infrastructure under strain like never before. With consumer expectations for seamless digital experiences continuing to spiral, any drop-off in application performance will leave customers disgruntled and immediately going elsewhere.
Our research highlight this out. 65% of consumers say they would feel angry or anxious if shopping applications and digital services fail to perform, and 71% said it would be enough for them to consider ditching online shopping altogether and returning to shopping in stores.
Significantly, the negative impact of bad digital experiences puts shoppers off even when brands are offering the very best discounts. 66% consumers believe that there’s never an excuse for a poor experience, no matter how good the deals on offer.
Ultimately, retail leaders need to recognize that holiday shoppers are now totally unforgiving if they encounter a problem with an application or digital service. They won’t simply try again later if they can’t get the products they want when using an application. 58% state that brands have just one opportunity to impress them, and if they don’t get the level of digital experience, they expect then they’ll delete the application immediately. The customer will be lost, probably forever.
Application observability: minimizing risk to reap the reward
As ever, the task of ensuring applications are performing at an optimal level will fall to IT teams. They’re used to working under intense pressure throughout the holiday season to ensure shoppers are getting the seamless digital experiences they value so highly. This year, the task will be even harder with unprecedented levels of demand.
The unfortunate truth for technologists is that managing application availability and performance is becoming ever more challenging. The rapid adoption of cloud native technologies has left IT teams looking after a sprawling, hybrid application landscape, and most still don’t have visibility into Kubernetes environments. They don’t have a clear line of sight for applications running across cloud native and on premises technologies, and this makes it incredibly difficult to understand root causes and resolve issues before they impact end user experience.
Application observability directly addresses these challenges, providing IT teams with full and unified visibility into applications across hybrid environments. Crucially, it correlates application availability and performance data with real-time business metrics so that technologists can quickly determine which issues pose the greatest threat to digital experience. Rather than being stuck on the back foot, scrambling to identify and understand issues, IT teams can take a proactive approach to managing their applications, while maximizing their business impact.
The adage remains true: with great reward comes great risk. Retailers that can deliver exceptional digital experiences over the coming weeks will see customers flooding to their applications and potentially record levels of sales; but those whose applications don’t make the grade will miss out on this unprecedented opportunity, and lose customers, revenue, and reputation.
(The author is Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
