Matthew Poepsel

Heavy traffic volumes brought on by peak sales periods can put even the most battle-tested websites and applications to the test. To make matters worse, missteps almost always seem to happen at times when businesses have the most to gain — or lose.

This is the era of the “web application delivery chain,” and poor performance at any step can trip up your shoppers’ experiences and potentially push them to a competitor’s site and mailing list. The harsh reality is that shoppers don’t care about what’s causing your poor performance, whether it’s a network provider bottleneck, a third-party content problem or a meddlesome browser glitch. They'll simply lay the blame squarely at your door. Like it or not, retailers are responsible for managing the performance of all the elements comprising the web application delivery chain.