Statistics show that 69 percent of users abandon their shopping carts. Users abandon carts for many reasons including slow performance and failing functionality. After a two second wait your visitors start dropping off, and by 5 seconds, you have lost half of them. Failing functionality and slow transactions can take you from 69 percent cart abandonment to 100 percent in a flash.
Let’s face it; a lot can go wrong that can cause unexpected errors and bog down user interactions. If your shopping cart or checkout processes fail, even for a few minutes, the cost to your business in revenue and reputation could be staggering. Safeguard your user’s journey and prevent or minimize the losses due to transaction failures and poor performance with Uptrends Web Application Monitoring.
The high cost of failing web applications
Web applications can fail quietly in subtle ways. Your uptime and performance monitoring sends you alerts for site outages, performance issues, and page errors, but, depending on the type of error and the extensiveness of your infrastructure monitoring, a failing web application may not issue any alert at all. Imagine your visitors hitting “Add to Cart,” but the shopping cart never updates. Would regular monitoring catch that error? Probably not, so, until your team notices the drop in revenue or gets the customer complaints, you may not know about application issues for hours. How long will it take until your support team springs into action? How long will the fix take? How much damage to your revenue and reputation can your brand handle?
An outage on Amazon.com in 2013 was estimated to cost the retailer over $66,000 each minute, and the problems persisted for over 30 minutes. If your e-commerce site’s shopping cart or checkout process stopped working for 30 minutes, what would the downtime cost your company in revenue? What are the losses per hour and day? From the moment your web application starts failing to the time your team becomes aware and fixes the problem, many hours and possibly days may pass. During that time, you’re losing current and future revenue.
Not only do you need to factor in the immediate losses, but also include how much potential revenue your business loses due to the damage to your brand’s reputation. The second your web applications start failing, your users may abandon your site entirely, tell others about their bad experience, and complain loudly on social media (many will do all three). A quick search on Twitter can find you many examples of angry tweets due to failing web applications. Do you remember Amazon’s notorious shopping cart issues during their Prime Day sale? Amazon was actually lucky to receive a screenshot of the error from the shopper in the tweet below.
Walmart should feel fortunate that this shopper in the tweet below kept going back to try to complete the transaction, for most users give up quickly. Walmart wasn’t so lucky as to get a screenshot of the error, so, it may have taken longer for Walmart’s team to track down the issue. In the meantime, how many other users experienced the same error?
Safeguard your web applications
The time between first error and an implemented fix may turn into hours, but you can shorten that time with Web Application Monitoring (sometimes called transaction monitoring). With Web Application Monitoring, Uptrends takes the same journey your user takes to complete a transaction on your website. Uptrends checks your application as frequently as every five minutes, and if Uptrends encounters anything unexpected, we notify you immediately.
With Web Application Monitoring, you can duplicate most any transaction your site’s visitors normally perform. Uptrends can:
- Login/logout
- Create an account
- Perform a site search
- Add or remove items in a shopping cart
- Complete a checkout with credit card purchases
It’s amazing what you can do with synthetic monitoring, and it’s easy. Using Uptrends Transaction Recorder, you simply click through your site and send Uptrends your recording. Our dedicated team of scriptwriters creates your scripts for you! Once your web application monitor goes live, Uptrends 160+ checkpoints load a real browser, navigate to your site, perform the user actions, and reports to you the second it confirms an application error. With this proactive approach, you can avoid the embarrassing tweets and the heavy hit to your reputation and revenue.
Web application performance and screenshots
You already know that your website’s performance has a direct correlation to your conversion rates. Because bounce rates increase with every second of user wait time, you need to know how your web applications perform. Most sites monitor a few primary landing pages for performance but don’t pay any particular attention to the rest of the site. With Web Application Monitoring, you also get detailed waterfall reports that show the execution and response times for your application pages. You can easily see the performance for each page element and fix those that slow down or block the user’s journey towards finalizing a purchase. You can also schedule application screenshots so that you can see the screen as it appears in the browser at that point in the transaction. Both tools lead to better user experiences and less downtime due to issues that elude troubleshooting.
Protect your website, brand, and revenue with Web Application Monitoring
Web Application Monitoring saves your company time, revenue, and reputation. If you’re already an Uptrends customer, talk to your monitoring consultant about what you need to do to get the power of Web Application Monitoring for your site. If you aren’t an Uptrends user, sign up for a free 30-day trial. No commitment and no credit card required!
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