Well, it's one for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready now
Go cat go
For eCommerce merchants, the months leading up to the hot Christmas season could be well described by the first verse of Blue Suede Shoes—the Carl Perkins song made famous by King Elvis. Yet with the complexity of today's eCommerce sites, the "fat lady" might not be singing about “money” and “show” but a different verse of the same song:
Well, you can knock me down
Step on my face
Slander my name all over the place
Because every year, there will be a couple of household brands that get tripped up by sluggish performance or outage problems that not only cost them millions in lost sales, but way, way more in trashed brand image and decreased stock value due to bad publicity in Blog-sphere or the Wall Street Journal. According to a recent 2007 poll by Harris Interactive
What to do? Though they tested everything thoroughly before the lock-down to avoid anything that has a remote chance of going wrong, something will go wrong (according to Murphy's Law). If an IT expert tells you there is no problem, it only means that from his/her perspective and based on what he/she can control there is no problem. What about the web cloud that IT has no direct control? It is called a cloud for a good reason—one cannot easily put an arm around this critical resources. And what about the interaction between application and infrastructure in terms of differences in patch or .dll level?
It's impossible to guarantee a trouble-free shopping season because of the complexity of the infrastructure and application including the screw-ups from third-party service providers and everything else which is beyond control of IT. The only way to deal with the challenge of providing superior end user experience is to:
1. Detect problems in real time from the real user’s perspective, and
2. Isolate the cause of problems quickly so repair can be carried out before they snow-balled into crisis proportion, and
3. Use the end user data to not only repair any problems, but also to optimized the infrastructure or application to minimize the chance of the same problems recurring.
Sounds difficult to implement the above procedure? Not really. You just have to get the right tools and take a systematic approach to managing Web application performance.
Oh yes, while you're thinking through the issue, enjoy this clip of Elvis singing Blue Suede Shoes.
"80 percent of U.S. adults who have had a negative experience with a company say they will never to go back to that company again, up from 68% in 2006."
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