If you have been keeping up with us, you’ll know that Panopta loves E-Commerce and is happy to see it blossoming.The New York Times, yesterday, posted an article on the growth in e-commerce by new players signalling that E-Commerce is no longer just the migration of existing companies to the internet. The article highlights how E-Commerce companies are hacking the middlemen out of brick and mortar stores and going straight to suppliers to significantly alter their industries. These altered industries, however, have their own issues.

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The primary issue for new e-commerce businesses like Warby Parker, Poppin, and Crane and Canopy, however, is not the elimination of middleman -”Going to factories in China is the easiest part”- it is building a reputation with customers and spreading the word around. And we have 3 take-aways about building respect in the E-commerce industry from what we’ve seen.

E-commerce is about service and content creation. Unlike brick and mortar stores where making objects easy to buy was the crucial part of the business and having  a big sign and  a great location to grabbed customers; E-commerce needs you to serve them in a constant and consistent way, not unlike a SaaS. Think about it, it is easier than ever to buy something yet that is broadly speaking true for everyone with the proliferation of services like Paypal. So access is no longer a part of the customer’s equation. So your location on internet and its ease of use does nothing to benefit you, your trump card now is making your site a “location” a place customers want to be because your site offers content and a voice that speaks to them. More than ever, being a merchant means having a distinct voice, not unlike a writer.

We have been tracking all sorts of e-commerce brands for a while now and we know that all the rules for a brick and mortar store are inverted. Traditional stores have traditional expectations attached to them: for example they only give you things after your first purchase. That paradigm has shifted, Poppin has an entire category of free stuff that markets its charm very quickly. Why has it shifted this way? The web is inside your customer’s house, their phone, and their tablet. You have to have a reason to be in their space.

Also, you have to be distinct in your service offering and savings in ways that traditional stores don’t. Hint: can anybody tell me the real difference between KMart, Kohls, and Sears?

So they key here is building a strong brand through being respectful and respected by customers.

Branding is your respect-machine

Here are Panopta’s top observations on building a great E-Commerce brand.

1. Treat it like a service.The internet has taken over everything because it is immediate and our expectations have shifted to the immediate. Every minute counts so be there for you customers every minute of every day whether its your webpage or your email servers. You must do all the back end stuff to guarantee that your brand is there for your customers whenever they want it. Going back to the fact that the web is literally in your customers houses and spaces don’t disrespect them by not serving them. This means providing content and suggestions in your copy, emails, blog that goes along with them leading better lives. People want to buy things from a voice that they respect and delivers “cool” or “relevant” information to them.
2. Create your own terms for SEO. Unless your product is entirely new in its conception and use then odds are Amazon already sells something like it and that “gets the job done.” In essence, “do you” and sell your product based on its image and lifestyle not its QVC-style features. Content may be the king but content is not just a product anymore but the entire sensibility of the product. And the internet is terrible place for sales-pitches because it is so transparent and there is so much genuine content that already exists. No one has time to care about your sales-pitch. Give your customers something that will slow them down and say, “hey, that’s sweet.” This means creating your own words and terms to put you ahead of the curve.
3. Stay visible. Don’t play games with you uptime availability. This one is pretty simple but it bears repeating because some traditional stores don’t understand this and it is reflected in their approach to the internet. Our favorite example is J&R whose webpage is built like a long list of pictures and long-non-descriptive-names-of-products-they-sell. Not only do they fail to offer anything to anyone in terms of content and advice on their page but their webpage, unsurprisingly had 423 minutes of downtime last quarter. They don’t use the internet as medium for communication but rather treat it like a catalog. Yet even catalogs offer a strong image of how or why one would use something for example the J. Crew catalog has always been very persuasive at selling the preppy lifestyle by subtly suggesting places to go and things to do in your J.Crew clothes. J&R’s webpage and its downtime has the effect sending out a catalog that looks like a phone book and it is only mailed out on rainy days.

These three simple things are a starting point for building respect with your customers and establish a dialogue for your business in an open and clear way. Perhaps this reason for this is all related to how open-source is the lingua franca of the internet and your servers, and that same mentality of open-source has slipped in to something as distant as selling bed linens. Who knows why? But today, content and access are king. Long live content. Long live access.

About Panopta

Through real-time performance monitoring, Panopta provides IT professionals and hosts reliable, actionable data for optimizing website and application availability, as well as managing service disruptions. Panopta monitors websites, email servers and network infrastructure for thousands of customers in a variety of key market segments. It serves as a trusted source of website and online application monitoring and provides independent analysis based on objective data.

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Americans spent $42.3 billion in retail e-commerce purchases over this holiday season and Panopta was there observing all those retailers and their network availability. After crunching the numbers from the 2012 Panopta Holiday Index, our analysis points to an uptrend for retailer availability compared to previous years.

The Panopta Holiday Index is designed as a high-level metric for measuring the uptime of the top 130 most popular retailers. The index is a free resource for retailers and our users as a comparison tool for their uptime performance during the holiday season. To those unfamiliar with the concept, uptime measures a server’s ability to be accessed by a user anywhere in the globe. This is pertinent to that $42.3 billion because server uptime is a basic necessity for retailers to be accessible to customers and revenue.

The Results

From November 15th, 2012 to January 4th, 2013, there was over 128 hours of total downtime from 86 of the 130 retail sites. Those 86 sites with outages averaged 89 minutes of total downtime. The remaining 44 had no measurable outages, responding properly to each of our 72,000 checks.

The outstanding 44 sites without outages include large retailers like Nike, Amazon, and Macy’s but also more specialized retailers like Williams-Sonoma, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Frys.com. The variety of industries from the monolithic online-only retailer Amazon to the specialty cookware retailer, Williams-Sonoma, reflect a sense that exceptional uptime management is important for all sectors of business whether it is a large exclusively online business or a specialized mixed e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail operation.

The 86 retailers who had significant outages also reflect a mixed bag of retail types but their core problem was singular: mismanagement of server resources. The top twenty most underperforming sites had a combined total of 102 hours of downtime. Follow the link here to see the complete list. Some particular problem sites that stood out:

• CB2 had 19 separate instances of outages with some ranging in 7 minutes all the way up to 22 minutes.
• BassPro Shops had eight outages with a total of 262 minutes of downtime.
• J&R had 18  outages that brought them up to a whopping 423 minutes of downtime.

Of those three performers each of them sells markedly different goods on completely different scales but obviously have poor server management in common. This highlights the fact that it does not matter the type or size of the business; all retailers need to take control of their network availability.

What it All Means

Compared to the 336 hours total downtime in 2011, retailer’s server performance in 2012 improved. It is clear that retailers have made adjustments to the shift in holiday shopping to the internet.  This general trend of better server performance by retailers is not a tide that lifts all ships equally – the websites that appeared in our pre-holiday white paper as our best performers all remained as the best performers while the worst performers all fell into the bottom twenty.

While we have seen a steady improvement from online retailers overall in this past shopping season, this improvement has not been significant enough to say that retailers have mastered the use of the internet to bolster shopping and improve customer’s experience by being available at all times. Instead, the facts serve only to tell us that retailers must continue to improve their network availability and remain vigilant to network errors.  There are uptime management solutions that can buttress underperforming networks and help improve even the most robust servers. Solutions like external server monitoring to inform your network professionals about outages. Two tiered internal monitoring with checks on network connections and individual server statistics can improve infrastructure administration by providing actionable data to your staff.

 

The E-Commerce Site Performance Predictions: Who is positioned to Capitalize on the 2012 Holiday Season? white paper published by Panopta in early November set aside some predictions for this last season, based on data from past years and the first nine months of the year, most of which have been accurate. Our best practice performers IKEA, Zappos.com, Overstock.com, and Bloomingdales had 100 percent uptime maintaining a meticulous record. The domains with the worst outage histories Fossil, Harry and David, Abercrombie and Fitch, and J&R all had significant downtime  during the holiday season and year.

If you’re looking to improve your site’s availability or just ensure that your strong performance continues, give us a call at 1-800-606-7153 or email us at sales@panopta.com to find out more about our advanced monitoring solutions.

Given the increased media attention to online shopping including MediaPost reported data from ComScore showing Black Friday online sales increased 26 percent from last year totaling $1.04 billion. And the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org projecting online sales to reach $96 billion this holiday season, it is clear that shoppers are rapidly shifting to an increasingly online shopping experience, adding to the importance of retailer managing website outages efficiently or avoiding them altogether.

In the spirit of holiday commerce, Panopta is currently monitoring over 130 major retail websites for outages and during the highly anticipated Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend we found that few suffered significant outages which impacted the consumer shopping experience.

Previously, Panopta found that about 45 percent of the analyzed sites’ uptime fell below the 99.9 percent industry standard of acceptable availability between January and September, even when excluding overnight hours from the analysis, signaling the potential for significant unplanned outages during the high-traffic holiday shopping season. Over Thanksgiving weekend, a handful of major retailers did suffer outages, some reaching more than 90 minutes, but these primarily occurred during the overnight or off-peak hours.

So far, most retailers have made it over the bar of acceptable availability.

The worst performing sites tracked by Panopta include Kmart, Sears, CDW, Tiger Direct and Victoria’s Secret. Fortunately, while each has suffered significant downtime, the outages primarily occurred in off-peak hours reducing their impact to the bottom line. However, as consumers embrace the new trend of season-long online deals beginning on Thanksgiving, retailers can’t rest on their laurels simply because Cyber Monday has come and gone; there’s still nearly a month of online shopping before Christmas Day.

We will continue to monitor retailer uptime during the holiday season and keep you posted on the Panopta Availability Index.