Ecommerce MAXed

Why does your ecommerce architecture need four levels of monitoring?
Here’s why:

Imagine going your site is up and running fine, but your payment gateway is down. Customers are adding items to their cart but can’t check out. It’s costing you sales and what’s worse, nobody knows.

Or

Imagine being frustrated and angry on a Tuesday morning. You just found out that your $5 shipping promotion was fat-fingered in as a $500 shipping promotion. It’s cost you thousands of dollars in sales over a long holiday weekend that are gone forever.

Or

Imagine your new PPC campaign is humming along and orders are pouring in but your fulfillment house isn’t keeping up. Products aren’t being shipped. Customers are getting frustrated. You are paying tons of money to acquire customers who will never want to do business with you again. And what’s worse, again, you don’t know….yet.

Those scenarios illustrate why we provide four levels of monitoring in our MaxEXP ecommerce infrastructure.

   1. We use KeyNote to make sure the site is up and performing within established performance metrics. KeyNote, which is also used by Cisco and eBay, checks your site from multiple servers around the US. If your site is down or being sluggish, KeyNote will alert us so we can fix the problem.

   2. We perform tests to make sure that system and integration points are up and running. Is Verisign’s payment gateway working? Yup. Is your integration with your ERP system working? Yes. Is FedEx working? No? That’s ok we set up a contingency to use flat rate shipping (or whatever you want) instead.

   3. We check to make sure that sales are happening at expected levels. If sales dip below what is normal, we fire off an alert and take action. Normal is defined by historical sales volume over the past year and takes into consideration your growth rates and personal threshold levels.

   4. We make sure you logistic processes are working. Are orders sent to fulfillment shipping? Are you getting confirmation numbers? Are all order status’s what they are expected to be? We run checks that find orders that have fallen through the cracks. Repeat & referral business is the life blood of ecommerce and we make sure your standards are being met.

So you can see, there really is more to ecommerce architecture monitoring than just checking to see the site is still up.

Can bad reviews actually be a good thing?

Yes, according to a study done by Adweek. Customers considerably prefer eCommerce sites with ratings and reviews over eCommerce sites without them, however this is only true if there is negative feedback among the reviews.

Without negative reviews consumers begin to doubt their validity, as well as their overall trust in the company. Negative reviews are also necessary for consumers during the purchasing process so that they can work through concerns they may have before purchasing.

If they don’t find answers on your site they will find it somewhere else. So make sure your site’s ratings and reviews are as credible as possible by minimizing the number of reviews that your site filters.