During the peak traffic days of Holiday season, many retailer websites experienced outages, due to higher than expected increase in site traffic which resulted in a range of technical issues including slow websites, server overloads and even site crashes. While these incidents create an undesired customer experience, it drove shoppers to other alternate options resulting in millions of dollars in lost sales for these websites in addition to thousands of non-returning customers.
Shoppers will abandon websites or mobile apps if they glitch, crash or load slowly.
Given the recent increase in the news around cyber hacking events, security and privacy of shopper data is also an area of major concern for shoppers as well as retailers. In 2017, we expect retailers to make significant investments in infrastructure to provide shoppers a safe, trusted and enduring environment that is capable of handling the increasing demands of the shifts in the retail landscape.