E-commerce, since 2020, multiplied its growth as the health crisis implied for people a change of habits, and for companies a change in the way they offer their products. This is an unprecedented growth that supports the importance of monitoring and support in e-commerce operations.
In fact, the Statista portal shows that In 2022, retail e-commerce sales were estimated to exceed 5.7 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide, and this figure is expected to reach new heights in the coming years.
And it is a growth that has not stopped, one that implies for organizations a constant digital adaptation and transformation, allowing them to maintain their levels of competitiveness and sales.
This requires establishing tools that facilitate the monitoring and support of their eCommerce operations, to ensure service availability, speed and quality of customer experience.
Next, we will analyze the importance of eCommerce monitoring and support to achieve the expected sales success.
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What does monitoring and support in e-commerce consist of?
Creating e-commerce platforms involves not only building a website but also the design of a robust infrastructure that guarantees the quality of service.
Additionally, once in operation, it must be monitored to ensure that all processes work properly 24×7.
Therefore, it is important to establish strategies that involve monitoring and support tools for the operation, and that allow the automation of routine follow-up tasks, but vital to guarantee the continuity of the service.
Monitoring and support refers to the constant supervision of the different platforms and services involved in e-commerce, in order to detect and correct in a timely manner any failure that may affect performance, security, and availability, as well as other variables that may have a direct impact on the operation and quality of the service offered.
Among the aspects that are considered in the practices of monitoring and support of the operation of an eCommerce, are:
- Security and protection of user data, including ensuring the application of rules and regulations that guarantee the care of their rights.
- Levels of usability, and navigation, among others, maintain customer satisfaction.
- Speed of response, availability, failures, and scalability, to ensure the proper functioning of the web portal both in the Back-End and Front-End.
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Importance of monitoring and support in eCommerce
E-commerce platforms have become an element of everyday life for users, and for many companies, their main source of revenue.
In fact, according to the eCommerce Platforms Web portal, between 12 and 24 million e-commerce sites are active worldwide. This reflects a growth in the levels of competitiveness that companies face, regardless of their size, and highlights the importance of not only the quality of the product or service offered but also the quality of the user experience and customer service.
The effect on users of poorly performing sites is reflected in a study presented by Forbes, which shows that factors such as lack of confidence in the security of the site (18%) and the complexity of the purchase process (17%) are causes of shopping cart abandonment.
Factors that can be mitigated by establishing timely follow-up mechanisms that alert about these deficiencies before they become detrimental to the company.
Benefits of applying monitoring and support strategies
Taking into account the importance of customer satisfaction for the achievement of sales objectives, especially in an environment where part of the buying process of users, involves conducting previous research to compare products and services.
This research, as indicated by the aforementioned eCommerce Platform portal, is carried out by 87% of buyers. Something that makes it imminent to establish practices such as monitoring and support that offer improvements in terms of:
- Reputation and service continuity. By providing mechanisms for the timely detection of failures or errors that affect the operation or security of the site, which guarantees the operability, and with this the customer’s confidence.
- Detection of improvements or innovation opportunities. By constantly monitoring the platform and user behavior within the website. Weaknesses, threats, and new opportunities can be analyzed.
- Optimization of the customer’s digital experience.
- Competitiveness, by offering services tailored to customer needs, with platforms capable of providing effective responses to requirements.
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What is required to establish monitoring and support strategies?
The monitoring and support of an eCommerce operation can make a difference in sales levels, loyalty, and competitiveness of a company.
Therefore, it is important to establish strategies from the beginning that guarantee the implementation of good monitoring and support practices for the eCommerce platform. And even more so when it is expected that by 2025 digital shoppers will spend $7.391 trillion dollars online, according to a study by eMarketer. Increasing the volume of users, transactions, and competitors.
Even with the arrival of Web 3.0 will open new spaces for e-commerce, by providing additional mechanisms to users; companies will increase the need to have defined strategies to ensure quality of service.
For this reason, monitoring and support practices offer tools to:
Monitoring of real users
It is a technique known as RUM (Real User Monitoring) that allows to detection of the response times of the actions performed by the user on the website, by tracking their steps and respecting the confidentiality of their information.
It allows us to determine bottlenecks in the flow of sales, delays in the delivery of value, and compliance with the quality levels intended to be offered to users. All this is classified and organized in reports with valuable data for leaders to make timely decisions when detecting problems or new opportunities.
Performance monitoring
This refers to all those factors that may be affecting the performance of the e-commerce portal.
The monitoring and support tool should be able to provide alerts and reports that give details on:
- Availability, tracking site availability, and detecting patterns that may affect it.
- Speed, response times offered by the site for each action, as well as the loading speed of each element, affect the user experience.
- Performance of services, servers, databases, networks, and communication channels that affect the e-commerce operation.
Synthetic transaction monitoring
By determining the critical processes within an eCommerce, it is possible to simulate flows that execute these processes, to determine in a timely manner failures or errors in the sales cycle within the portal, or to pass quality tests before implementing new changes in production.
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Importance of eCommerce operations monitoring and support – Conclusion
Monitoring and support services, regardless of the size of the organization, allow for establishing quality levels and implementing mechanisms that enable compliance control, something that undoubtedly translates into a key factor for the success of a company.
To achieve this, it is important to establish objectives, management indicators, and service levels, which are the basis for the implementation of monitoring and support systems, ones that further allow to supervise the optimal performance of all services involved in the operation.
At NULogic we know how important it is for organizations to guarantee their customers the continuity, availability, and reliability of the eCommerce service they offer, as it is a key part of their business success.
For this reason, we provide monitoring and support services for technologies, infrastructure, applications, data, and transactions. To give you a global vision of your operation through detailed reports and generate timely responses according to the established metrics.
Need more information? Contact us, we will be happy to help you find the best solution to monitor and support your e-commerce business.