Get Your E-Commerce Site Ready for the Holidays With Online Monitoring
As with brick-and-mortar stores, the holiday season is a critical time for many e-commerce sites. Like their offline brethren, these sites see significant increases in both traffic and revenue during the holidays. In fact, holiday e-commerce revenues account for up to 40 percent of annual sales for many companies. If your company sells its merchandise online, you have a big responsibility to make sure that your website performs reliably on all types of browsers, mobile devices, etc., to accommodate the increased traffic the holidays bring.
Of course these changes in user behavior don't just affect e-commerce sites. Consider a social networking site like foursquare, a location-based website designed for users to check in at venues. Normally, people might check into foursquare three times to four times a week, but during the holiday season that frequency might double as they visit more stores and eat out more often while rushing between those stores. On an individual basis that may not sound significant, but if a large percentage of your user base doubles their frequency, you better hope you've planned accordingly.
Many IT departments will actually change their regular development process in order to handle these changes in user behavior. Starting early in November, many IT teams will stop rolling out new features and halt large projects that might be disruptive to the site or its underlying infrastructure. As the IT department's focus shifts away from features, most often it turns towards infrastructure and optimization. Adding new monitoring tools, from improved logging to new metrics and graphs, becomes critical as IT teams seek to have a comprehensive view of site operations so they can better understand the changes in traffic that are happening, and hopefully be proactive about solving problems before they turn into outages.
Online retailers must also focus their attention on profiling and optimization during the holiday readiness season. Studies continue to show correlations between page load speeds and website responsiveness to increased revenue. Making improvements to these areas is something that can typically be done without having to change the behavior of how things work. IT teams also like to target bug fixes during these times as those corner cases are more likely to show up as traffic increases, especially since many times new users are being added while your existing users are increasing their frequency.
This brings up a good question: If your brand sells online, what should you be monitoring? Most retailers generate standard graphs for like disk space or memory usage. This information is good to have, but it only scratches the surface. Your operations staff probably knows all kind of metrics about the system and the need to monitor it, but how about your application developers? They should know the code that runs your site inside and out, so challenge them to find key metrics in your application stack that are important for their work. For example, how many messages are delivered to the queuing system, what is the time it takes to process the shipping costs module, or how responsive is a third-party API like Facebook or Twitter?
Don't stop there, however. Everyone in your company should be asking themselves the following: What analytics could I use to make better informed decisions? For example, do you know if your increased traffic is due to new or existing users? If you're monitoring new user sign-ups, this will start to give you some insight. If you're transacting e-commerce, you should also be tracking revenue-related numbers. Those types of monitors are more business focused, but they're critical to everyone at your company. Etsy, "the world's handmade marketplace," believes they're important enough to project these types of metrics right out in public.
Ideally, once you have this type of information being logged, you can collect the information for analytical reports and historical trending via graphs. It's important to be able to take the data you're collecting and correlate between metrics. You want to be able to analyze scenarios such as the following: given the 10 percent increase in new users this past week, we've seen a 15 percent spike in web server traffic. If we project those numbers out, can we make it through Black Friday? Cyber Tuesday? Will we make it all the way to New Year's, or do we need to start provisioning new machines *NOW*? What happens if our business model changes and we're required to live through a "Black Friday" event every day?
These are the kinds of challenges that a social shopping site faces, with its daily turnover of inventory. You may not need this analytical information in real time, but ideally you'll be able to get a mix of real-time, near-time (five minutes aggregated data is common) and daily analytical reports. Additionally, you should talk with your operations staff about which metrics are mission critical.
While nothing beats preparation, even the best laid plans need good feedback loops to be successful. Measuring, collecting, analyzing and acting upon data as it comes into your organization is critical in today's online environment. You may not be able to predict the future, but having solid monitoring systems in place will help you to recognize problems before they become critical, giving you a "snowball's chance" during the holiday season.
Robert Treat is the chief operating officer of OmniTI. Robert can be reached at robert@omniti.com.