Ecommerce leaders must adopt AI observability to avoid outages, delight customers, and secure festive-season sales, writes Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Asia-Pacific and Japan at New Relic
The festive season is make-or-break for ecommerce businesses in India. The 2024 season alone saw ecommerce platforms clock in around USD 14 billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). While the season presents incredible opportunities for ecommerce players, customers have little patience for slow or buggy apps. And with competitors just a click away, ecommerce providers need to ensure that their sites are performant 24/7, especially as traffic surges and sales spike.
Data supports this sentiment, with the State of ecommerce in India report revealing that almost two-thirds of ecommerce consumers will leave an app if it buffers for more than 10 seconds. Additionally, 59 per cent stated that a faster load time would delight them the most, compared to other mobile shopping app features. To delight customers and boost sales, every digital touchpoint needs to run smoothly; this includes everything from website visits and app downloads, to speedy checkout flows. ecommerce businesses need a proactive observability strategy in place to ensure business uptime, and provide seamless customer experiences around the clock.
How observability turns the tide during the festive season
During the festive season every second counts. As huge numbers of consumers flood ecommerce websites, businesses need a robust strategy in place to proactively address unplanned outages or lag. AI-strengthened observability provides businesses with a 360-degree view of system telemetry across the tech stack, enabling them to swiftly identify SLO (Service-Level Objective) breaches, and performance dips before they impact customers.
Observability platforms with real-time monitoring enable businesses to spot and connect front-end friction with backend issues early, even before they reach the customer. These platforms track the entire customer journey, from browsing to ordering, identifying any friction points that might hinder their experience. AI-strengthened observability also enables engineers to get to the root cause of the error. It automatically collects user behaviour data to pinpoint experience issues and can initiate remedial actions, significantly shortening the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
A practical dissection
Imagine an ecommerce company is gearing up for its biggest sale of the year during Diwali. Despite being well-prepared with load testing and infrastructure scaling, a critical issue arises: when users reach the payment page, the site crashes. With traditional tools, a technical team might spend hours sifting through logs, and manually correlating data to get to the bottom of the issue.
Through continuous monitoring and tracking, AI-strengthened observability immediately flags the issue, but it doesn’t just report the crash. It goes a step ahead by providing an AI-powered session summary that fetches the entire user journey leading up to the failure. This summary takes the technical team directly to the point of friction, providing an instant diagnosis of the problem.
Instead of a vague and simple “payment page crash” alert for example, the system presents a comprehensive analysis report, eliminating the need for manual guesswork and prolonged investigations. With this precise information, the technical team can proactively resolve the issue in less time. This quick resolution minimises downtime, prevents digital interruptions, and ensures the company capitalises on every single sales opportunity during the festive season, leading to improved customer satisfaction and a successful festive sale.
Building reliable sales platforms
The festive season offers a huge sales boost for businesses, and in today’s fiercely competitive market with countless consumer choices, app and website stability is non-negotiable for success.
By embracing AI-strengthened observability, businesses can move beyond siloed traditional insights and alerts. This technology enables them to take precise, proactive actions that ensure the stability of their digital platforms. As customers increasingly shop online and festive sales become a major opportunity for capital gain, no business can afford to miss out. AI-strengthened observability is the best path forward, not only for capitalising on festive sales but also for ensuring long-term success.
