Ecommerce MAXed

Maybe it’s time to look at all aspects of your business with new eyes. Seek improvement across the board.

Perhaps you’ll find the skill sets and competitive advantages that got you to this point need to evolve. It’s no longer enough to be really good a just a few things.

In this series, we’ll look at four areas where you can improve. Starting with…

1) How well are you dealing with the technical side of your business?

   1. As you grow, are you using technology to improve the efficiency of your processes (shipping, inventory, CRM, warehouse management etc.) or are you throwing more bodies at the problem?
   2. Are you using custom tools to make your site more valuable to customers, improve search results and create competitive barriers to entry?
   3. Are you doing enterprise ecommerce hosting or are you still trying to do it on the cheap?

Why does your ecommerce architecture need four levels of monitoring?
Here’s why:

Imagine going your site is up and running fine, but your payment gateway is down. Customers are adding items to their cart but can’t check out. It’s costing you sales and what’s worse, nobody knows.

Or

Imagine being frustrated and angry on a Tuesday morning. You just found out that your $5 shipping promotion was fat-fingered in as a $500 shipping promotion. It’s cost you thousands of dollars in sales over a long holiday weekend that are gone forever.

Or

Imagine your new PPC campaign is humming along and orders are pouring in but your fulfillment house isn’t keeping up. Products aren’t being shipped. Customers are getting frustrated. You are paying tons of money to acquire customers who will never want to do business with you again. And what’s worse, again, you don’t know….yet.

Those scenarios illustrate why we provide four levels of monitoring in our MaxEXP ecommerce infrastructure.

   1. We use KeyNote to make sure the site is up and performing within established performance metrics. KeyNote, which is also used by Cisco and eBay, checks your site from multiple servers around the US. If your site is down or being sluggish, KeyNote will alert us so we can fix the problem.

   2. We perform tests to make sure that system and integration points are up and running. Is Verisign’s payment gateway working? Yup. Is your integration with your ERP system working? Yes. Is FedEx working? No? That’s ok we set up a contingency to use flat rate shipping (or whatever you want) instead.

   3. We check to make sure that sales are happening at expected levels. If sales dip below what is normal, we fire off an alert and take action. Normal is defined by historical sales volume over the past year and takes into consideration your growth rates and personal threshold levels.

   4. We make sure you logistic processes are working. Are orders sent to fulfillment shipping? Are you getting confirmation numbers? Are all order status’s what they are expected to be? We run checks that find orders that have fallen through the cracks. Repeat & referral business is the life blood of ecommerce and we make sure your standards are being met.

So you can see, there really is more to ecommerce architecture monitoring than just checking to see the site is still up.