Can Lock-down Prevent Lock-out?

Lock-down or Lock-out?  The Goal is Delivering Performance to Keep Transactions Flowing

'Tis the season for eCommerce sites to lock down applications and infrastructure to prepare for the holiday rush. Yes, it's the season when merchants hope that by freezing all changes to code and infrastructure no one will touch anything that might cause response-time issues.

Complex Systems Hide Performance Problems

Unfortunately, lock-down can't prevent customer lock-out.  Given the complexity of today’s eCommerce sites, hidden problems always lurk like time bombs everywhere in deployed and fully tested systems—infrastructure, application, or the interaction of these pieces. These problems are intermittent so they are hard to duplicate.  They are caused by the every changing Web.  And worse, they have the power to lock-out online shoppers -- presenting a brick wall that keeps shoppers from completing their transactions.

The Four Second Rule

Response time is a crucial part of online selling. To keep customers engaged, IT must meet or beat the goal of four-second page load times. When load-times exceed four seconds, customers often click to a competitor’s site. So, to keep response-times low, merchants try different approaches to gain control of the many distributed and moving pieces of technology that reside both inside and outside the firewall. Only if IT can control all these variables can they consistently meet shoppers’ expectations.

The basic nature of the Web works against IT’s need to control the system. In this regard, using a cloud to represent the Web is apt in many ways—like weather the Web cloud is unpredictable and fluid; and it’s just as impossible to control. Take for example what might happen to an online retailer who has just deployed new content using pictures or video to show new merchandise and perhaps a virtual mannequin to display the wares. To support these new applications perhaps they have added new infrastructure components like servers or network appliances.

Will it Really Work Under the Load of Real Holiday Traffic?

It worked in the test environment and even in production.  But given the fluid nature of the Web the real question is: How long will it continue working? When real holiday shoppers hit the site in droves will the new components perform as expected? What  unseen problems lurk in the system that that might rise-up and attack under the stress of real load?  When performance problems occur it’s highly likely that shoppers will find that even the most compelling shopping experience has transformed into a “perma-wait” state that only motivates them to click away and shop elsewhere.

Every Customer Counts

With the projected dismal growth in overall retail sales in the US caused by the housing credit crunch, online shopping is expected to be an ever more important slice of the overall retail pie this holiday season. According to a survey by Burst Media, four out of five shoppers are planning to research gifts online. And 50.7% of shoppers are planning to purchase gifts online versus only 37.6% who did so in 2006. eCommerce merchants just cannot afford to be lackadaisical about end-user response time. Tools and processes must be in place prior to and after the lock-down so that and problems with response time can be detected in real time and fixed quickly to keep the online shoppers happy. More in the next blog.

Comments

[Olechka-persik]

Thanks for post. Nice to see such good ideas.