The festive season in India, with holidays including Diwali, Holi, and Christmas, is accompanied by big sale events on e-commerce platforms. Consumers looking for a bargain at flagship events like the Amazon Great Indian Festival and Flipkart’s Big Billion Day are on the rise, with Amazon’s sale alone seeing 95 million customers visit its app in just 48 hours.
It comes as no surprise that more than seven out of ten customers in India use mobile apps for these kinds of online purchases. The recent New Relic State of Ecommerce in India report revealed that there are opportunities for existing and new players alike to succeed in this space, and secure revenue amid growing demand.
But in such a competitive landscape, ecommerce organisations must ensure that they deliver the best possible digital experiences to those making purchases online. There are some key lessons that online retailers must learn if they are to weather the storms in 2024 and beyond.
Reliability is imperative
India’s propensity for online shopping presents great opportunities for businesses.
The report revealed that eighty-one percent of customers use their smartphone or mobile device to make purchases online. Such high levels of uptake and engagement provide ample opportunities for ecommerce companies to capture the attention of an engaged audience, and for developers to create a seamless user experience.
However, issues during digital experiences often frustrate customers, especially when website visits spike during festive sales. In 2023, consumers faced many challenges with mobile apps, including a barrage of notifications (41%) slow buffering or loading times (38%), and draining batteries (34%). Such curveballs to digital experiences hamper smooth purchase journeys. Therefore, retailers should address these preventable challenges as they develop and maintain the long-term success and reliability of their mobile apps.
Speed cannot be compromised
There’s nothing more frustrating than opening a mobile app and having it load slowly. Consumers place huge importance on the speed and responsiveness of apps, as well as product delivery time. The report found that nearly half (46%) of Indians noted that a key reason to download a shopping app was that it offered a better or faster user experience compared to a web version.
Every customer that has a slow and inconvenient experience loses revenue. With high expectations placed on apps, the challenges surrounding slow buffering times are make or break. Nearly 60% of Indian customers won’t stay on an app for more than 10 seconds due to buffering, showing that online retailers must prioritise speed and uptime. This becomes doubly important, with 20% saying they wouldn’t tolerate more than five seconds of buffering before they abandoned or switched apps.
The technology infrastructure that supports these holiday periods must be highly agile and scalable. If businesses have tech stacks that can’t cope with the load, they’ll struggle to deliver the best end-user experiences and miss out on the huge revenue opportunities that sale events have to offer. It’s particularly important that retailers have reliable systems in place to ensure they can support increased demand and traffic spikes.
Observability is the linchpin for successful online sales
By leveraging an all-in-one observability platform, retailers can gain better visibility into the breadth of their technology stack, making it easier to resolve issues like slow loading time before customers are impacted. Additionally, it helps identify customer trends to ensure that such problems don’t occur in the future.
Furthermore, by consolidating monitoring, logs, and traces on a unified platform, retailers have a single source of truth; offering visibility across the customer lifecycle and allowing developers to avoid the pitfalls that come from having siloed data from multiple point solutions. This ensures that customers have smooth buying journeys at every stage of their online shopping experience.
Ecommerce businesses must develop mobile apps that work faster and reliably while offering better user experiences. This is a competitive advantage with customers seeking speedy delivery experiences, and access to highly agile and scalable systems that can keep pace with the biggest festival sales.
Given the consumer demand for better technology, ecommerce companies have much to gain from adopting a robust observability platform that provides end-to-end visibility across its technology systems. Such an approach ultimately leads to better business outcomes, and the ability to secure success into 2024 and beyond.
