Black Friday is here! Would you like your eCommerce to survive it? Monitor it!

eCommerce monitoring. Are you ready for Black Friday?

What problems may your eCommerce face?

If you are reading this article, we assume it is because you have an eCommerce, a digital business you have put all your effort in (and all your money). Or maybe you’re a service provider offering services to eCommerce clients. Black Friday is coming! The official day of going crazy shopping and consuming, when Christmas shopping season is inaugurated and many retail stores and department stores take the chance to celebrate a day of sales that consumers have engraved on their shopping calendar. You have to be prepared and you may think you are. You have all your products displayed on your cute and well profiled website. However, have you noticed the possible weak spots that could make everything go wrong?

Think about it, a failure in the infrastructure that supports an online store could seriously affect the business. “In what way?”, you may wonder. Let’s see some problems that may arise:

• Traffic losses: Any minor failure you are not aware of on your website can lead to traffic drop, and more so on dates as demanding as Black Friday. For example, if the servers that support your eCommerce crash or there’s a network “bottleneck”, it could mean losing thousands of sales opportunities.
• Billing: Your online store is the window to the world outside, and if there are issues with it, you will see how turnover drops drastically. This situation is very common for specific days of sales or on certain dates, and can do a lot of damage to the revenue of a company.
• Brand prestige and loss of customers: You cannot afford to have your eCommerce website malfunction. That is the face of the company, the symbol, everything the user knows. For that reason, it must always work fast and effectively, which makes the potential buyer feel comfortable when exploring it through its different tabs and resources. Your online store will be the one responsible for a large part of the prestige of the brand if it works well and the one who will be responsible for losing lots of customers if it doesn’t work properly.
• Positioning in Google: It is the biggest weapon that you have to master to face the world of eCommerce. “Positioning” is a set of actions aimed at improving the place where your website appears in the list of search engines such as Google. And, as you can imagine, it is essential to stay in the first results of Google. If you have trouble, such as a server failure that makes it impossible to access your website, or other kinds of failures that make traffic slow, the search engines will probably condemn you to very low positions in search results.
• Splurging on advertising: It is very likely that you have put a lot of effort into advertising your eCommerce to have a great Black Friday. Needless to say, all this accumulation of effort, love and money will not be rewarded if your website fails to turn them into profits due to a malfunction.

For all these types of problems that can bring down all your hopes and your business, it is better to be cautious. Watch every point so that nothing can go wrong. For that there is monitoring and we apply it in the most flexible and successful way.

What does eCommerce monitoring supervise?

Monitoring your systems will allow you to know if the computing that supports your business is working as it should and will give you the necessary tools to anticipate those problems that may arise. Let’s see some specific aspects of eCommerce monitoring.

-Server monitoring

Servers are the computing devices that provide service to the web, users, etc. They are key! That is why it is necessary to monitor whether they work, their response times, database operation, web loading speed, ftp, email, etc. Never forget them. You owe them your eCommerce existence.

-Network monitoring

Network is also an essential element for your service. There can be no “bottlenecks” or serious drops in performance. You should be prepared for traffic spikes, especially if it’s Black Friday or any other day with lots of sales! For that you can have at your disposal a history of the same dates of previous years to make forecasts, and make sure that you are and will be prepared.

-Application monitoring

Increasingly, applications are essential to provide service in an eCommerce, and therefore it is essential to monitor their correct operation. It is another element that you cannot afford to let fail. They are part of the essential windows of your eCommerce and must always be under watch.

-User Experience Monitoring

Users come first, your business depends on them and you have to pamper them. You have to know whether the website responds well to users or if it is slow, fails, or if there is any delay or error in the purchasing process, etc. Imagine that your entire website works fine, but purchases cannot be completed. It would be a disaster, don’t you think so?

-SLA Compliance

If, as it is quite frequent, your website receives services from a third party (for example, hosting), monitoring can help you find out whether the SLAs are met or if there have been failures or deficiencies.

-Alerts

So that you can relax and work smoothly, monitoring will help you program a series of alerts that will notify you immediately if there are failures or dangerous levels of any parameter are reached. These alerts should be able to reach you through different means (email, mobile messages, etc.).

Monitor your eCommerce with Pandora FMS

Now you may be wondering: And how do I do all of the above? Is there a tool that allows me to monitor my eCommerce or the eCommerce of my clients without losing my mind with a thousand different screens and applications?

Of course, it’s called Pandora FMS.

Pandora FMS is an all-in-one monitoring software, capable of monitoring networks, servers, applications, user experience and much more.

If you want to know what Pandora FMS can offer you, you can visit our website .

Or if you want to check it on site, you can get a FREE Pandora FMS Enterprise 30-DAY TRIAL.

If your business and your monitoring needs are smaller, you may also get Pandora FMS Community version.

Be that as it may, enjoy Black Friday, and Pandora FMS!

*Article written by Dimas Pardo with the collaboration of Robin Izquierdo.