The Covid-19 pandemic has created a paradigm shift in consumer behavior causing a significant change in the retail industry trends. It has changed the way we work, shop, and communicate with people more than any other disruption in the recent past.

According to the recent US Consumer survey conducted by National Retail Federation (NRF) in March 2020:

Trends like Click-and-Collect/Buy Online pick up In-store, Ship-from-Store have accelerated sharply and have exploded within the last month due to COVID-19 and in-person shopping restrictions thus affecting the essential and non-essential businesses.

Changes in shopping behavior based on the current circumstances have impacted a retailer’s Omni-channel systems and have led to an increase in network volume from customers and employees working remotely thereby giving rise to various performance-related issues. Retailers can be a victim of a traffic-related crash, especially in the current scenario. For instance, UK retailer Ocado was struggling to cope with a barrage of online orders thus leading to app/website crash.

Five root-cause reasons your retail applications are slow:

Retailers thus need to ensure they have performant, scalable, and always-on enterprise e-commerce solutions and sales channels to swiftly accommodate growing and shifting business needs.

As a first step towards fixing your system problems, retailers can do simple self-analysis with the following questions.

  • Is your e-commerce platform equipped to handle an influx of digital orders?
  • Are your applications running at their full potential?
  • Are there any performance issues with 3rd party and enterprise integrations and have these been anticipated and dealt with?
  • What is the server utilization?
  • Are enough backups and database monitoring & health checks being done at the corporate and store level?
  • Is your enterprise architecture being monitored 24X7?

After doing a self-analysis, retailers will be able to identify the existing potential performance issues. To mitigate these, they can reach out to experts with capabilities that build quality and performance throughout an organization. Without an innovative, comprehensive, and automated performance tuning solution, it gets difficult for retail businesses to overcome the challenges within the system or the application, all of which can adversely impact the brand value and business revenue.

Performance engineering as an aid:

Performance engineering solutions will enhance the retail IT performance and help mitigate risks in the early stages. It will help retailers ensure all their Omni-channel systems are stable, reliable, and are seamlessly integrated to deliver a unified brand-customer relationship across all channels.

Source: securityinformed.com

Aspire’s Performance Engineering & IT Support Services helps you identify all business-critical scenarios for performance testing in the early stages. Take a look at our performance tuning solutions kit that will help you handle the surge in demand during the Covid situation. Our team of experts makes your systems resilient enough to meet your growing business demands in a cost-effective manner, thereby enabling you to operate through disruption.