By Gregg Ostrowski, Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics
With rising costs of living affecting people across the globe, deals available during online shopping events are now a key part of the retail calendar. From the notable deals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to holiday sales in December and January, shoppers are searching for the best possible discounts on gifts for friends and family, household essentials, or new clothes and gadgets.
With most of this shopping now taking place online, consumers have developed zero tolerance for any online retailer who fails to provide anything less than a personalized, effortless digital experience. As online shoppers are scrambling for the best bargains, they don’t have the time or patience to put up with poorly performing applications. Any interruption, lag, or potential issue, is very likely to result in frustration and the shopper will leave for another app or service.
For retailers, online shopping during the holiday season is an opportunity to attract new customers and maintain existing ones. Success, in the form of return customers, will ultimately result from combining deals customers want along with flawless digital experiences.
Demand for deals this holiday season
We recently conducted global research across 12 countries, exploring consumer attitudes towards seasonal shopping and holiday sales. According to the Cisco AppDynamics report, the demand for deals and discounts will be heavily impacted by current financial pressures.
The survey found that 91% of consumers will rely on online shopping applications and services during the holiday period. Interestingly, as many as 95% feel it is going to be more important for them to find great deals and cheap prices this year, given rising costs of living and an uncertain economy.
This demand for deals during this holiday season represents a massive opportunity for all aspects of the retail sector. Brands who offer and promote low prices have a chance to attract massive volumes of new customers and drive revenue.
Shoppers want great deals and easy digital experiences
For retailers, great deals aren’t enough on their own to impress customers. In our study, we discovered 95% of consumers say it’s important for online shopping apps and digital services to provide a fast and seamless experience without any delays or disruption, and 78% say the experience they get when using a shopping app is just as important as the deals being offered. This reflects the trend we’ve been seeing over the last three years as consumer expectations around digital experiences have skyrocketed.
While it may be the season of giving, shoppers have zero tolerance for apps that are slow and unresponsive. 73% claim it doesn’t matter how good the deals are that retailers are offering, there is still no excuse for poor online shopping experiences, and 63% state that if the applications and digital services they use to find great deals this holiday season fail to perform, it will leave them feeling anxious and angry.
Interestingly, in our App Attention Index 2021 research, 57% of people stated that brands have only one shot to impress them and if their digital service doesn’t perform, they won’t use it again. In this new survey, we saw this figure rise to 64%, indicating that digital experience is growing even more critical in today’s deal-driven landscape.
Digital experience: the top priority for retailers
The message for retailers is clear – it’s simply not enough to put all focus on low prices. It’s also important to fortify the infrastructure that creates those flawless digital experiences. But within many retail IT teams, managing IT availability and performance is becoming increasingly challenging.
To support digital transformation initiatives, more and more retailers have adopted cloud native technologies, such as microservices and Kubernetes. While this is a step in the right direction, it also increases the complexity of IT environments. Retail IT teams are now having to manage vastly complex cloud native application architectures and, in many cases, they’re struggling to generate the necessary visibility and insight into the applications and infrastructure that run on public clouds.
In these systems, an immense volume of telemetry metrics, events, logs and traces are generated each second. Most IT teams may not have the tools to understand the vast influx of data in their highly distributed systems and hybrid environments, which makes it difficult to quickly troubleshoot application and performance issues.
To overcome this challenge, retailers must prioritize investment and implementation of modern, cloud native observability solutions. They must empower and enable IT teams to easily monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape so they can quickly identify the root cause of issues and expedite resolution.
With real-time insights from the business transaction’s telemetry data and subsequent rapid remediation, retail IT teams can ensure applications are primed to deliver the digital experiences that shoppers now expect. The retailers who combine enticing deals with flawless application performance over the coming weeks will undoubtedly position themselves to attract customers and drive sales, establishing that ever-important customer loyalty, which is valuable all year long.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregg Ostrowski is an Executive CTO at AppDynamics. He engages with customer senior leadership to help prioritize their strategy for digital transformation. Prior to AppDynamics, Gregg held senior leadership positions at Samsung and Research in Motion.
