Report: Retailers Lose Millions Annually to Invisible Internet Failures

Let’s start with the bad news: if your website or app slows down during a sale, a product launch, or a major inflection point, consumers won’t wait. They’ll bounce. They might complain — in a DM if they like you; in public if they don’t. Even worse, they may never come back.

And you may not even know it’s happening until it’s too late.

In a new 2025 Forrester study commissioned by Catchpoint, 65 percent of retail decision-makers said site slowdowns have the same impact as full-on outages. These disruptions increase customer churn and directly impact revenue. And yet, most companies are still flying blind by only monitoring a fraction of their digital infrastructure, even as customer expectations hit all-time highs.

Downtime is No Longer Your Biggest Risk. Latency is.

Today’s retail experience is a blend of front-end design, third-party integrations, APIs, and a list of other jargony words too long to mention. If even one piece hiccups (e.g., payment gateway delay, routing error, image CDN misfire) it can all grind to a halt, risking sales and reputational damage.

In fact, in that same Forrester report, 42 percent of e-commerce companies said they lost more than $500K in a single month due to internet disruptions — around $6 million annually. And here’s the kicker: while companies that monitor the entire internet stack (not just their own servers) reported 54 percent fewer losses, only one-third of companies reported monitoring performance across the full internet stack and enterprise. Why the discrepancy?

Partial Visibility = Missed Revenue

True internet performance monitoring (IPM) means end-to-end visibility, from your infrastructure to your vendors to the user’s last mile. It’s about knowing what’s impacting the digital experience — even if outside your control — because consumers don’t care where the problem started. They care that your site didn’t deliver. You wouldn’t optimize only half of your supply chain, or analyze only part of your sales funnel, so why only monitor a slice of your digital experience?

Your website is a business driver, and it can also be a business risk. While many perceive it as a backend concern, playing defense only, poor performance can drag down conversion rates, damage search engine optimization, and diminish brand trust. However, some retail execs are flipping the script by playing offense and investing in proactive monitoring as a competitive advantage to improve speed, optimize CX, and keep revenue on track.

Control What You Can, Monitor What You Can’t

The internet is made up of third parties your team doesn’t manage. That’s exactly why it’s necessary to monitor them. If you’re only watching what happens inside your four walls, you’re missing the full picture and exposing your business to avoidable risks. The biggest threat to retailers might not be pricing pressure or aggressive competitors; it might be a third-party script that tanks your page load time by three seconds.

It’s time to treat internet performance as the revenue lever it truly is. Because a high-performing site doesn’t just win the sale, it earns the customer.

Leo Vasiliou is director, product marketing at Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring (IPM) solution.