Stores Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 64) NUTS AND BOLTS / COMMUNICATIONS Abandonment Issues Performance monitoring helps drugstore.com fix problems in real time BY LIZ PARKS rugstore.com has served more than nine million customers since its launch in 1998. Like many online retailers, drugstore.com keeps track of the number of active customers (2.4 million); how much visitors spend on an average order ($75); and repeat visitors (they accounted for 82 percent of second-quarter sales). d Three years ago, IT management sought to gain a better understanding of what customers were experiencing when they made an online visit. Did the pages load quickly? Were customers able to make a purchase without any interruptions? Were they satisfied with page served a customer an error mestheir experiences? sage,” he says. “There would be time drugstore.com needed a performancegaps; we were not getting data in real monitoring tool to answer these types of time that would allow us to respond to questions, and ultimately chose Trueperformance problems immediately.” Sight appliances from Poway, Calif.Now, the IT department receives an based Coradiant. alert as soon as there is a performance Most first-generation performance issue. “We can immediately go into that monitoring companies “had a lot of oversession and see what the user clicked head,” says Don Allen, drugstore.com’s onto and determine whether it was an senior director of IT operations. “There isolated incident, a hiccup, a user error or were servers running applications, so some type of network issue,” Allen says. you had server overhead plus program Alistair Croll, co-founder and vice resource allocation. But because Corapresident of products and marketing for diant is an appliance-based sysCoradiant, says there are two aspects to tem, you have a single any e-commerce offer. The first is “Did patching solution [that] the customers like it and buy it?”; is easier to implement the second is “Were they able to ING and maintain.” buy it?” Web analytic products NITOR MO S TOOL drugstore.com has help retailers answer the former; sophisticated systems user performance Web analytic products: for capturing, analyzmanagement prod“Did the customers like it ing and reporting ucts address the latand buy it?” data, but they were ter, he says. Croll cites one unable to provide User performance Coradiant client “up-to-the-minute management products: that “was franticalperformance moni“Were they able to buy it?” ly trying to find a toring or tell us if a 64 STORES / NOVEMBER 2007 way to get the three million existing customers they thought they had to buy more.” As it turns out, the company actually had four million customers on any given day, but 25 percent of those shoppers were receiving errors and couldn’t complete a transaction. “That e-retailer realized it needed to focus not on the three million customers who were getting through, but on the one million who weren’t,” he says. Installing the TrueSight customermonitoring appliance was “easy,” Allen says. “It’s an inline tap. We mirrored one of the external ports on our load balancer, and we lined it up and plugged it in. It took minutes, and it really requires minimal training to use.” Installing watchpoints Using pre-established parameters or “watchpoints” around areas of the site that they particularly want to monitor, the IT team can monitor each shopper’s web experience from log-in through checkout. The IT team can see whether customers are experiencing slowdowns in the loading of pages and scripts; if WWW.STORES.ORG http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://www.drugstore.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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