Report Captures How Ecommerce Businesses Fared During the Holiday Season

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Webscale, the “Any Platform” Commerce Cloud, released its flagship 2019 State of E-Commerce Infrastructure Report, which analyzes findings from a comprehensive survey of more than 450 ecommerce professionals regarding how their online stores performed during the 2019 holiday season.

The report provides valuable insights into how ecommerce businesses planned for and fared during the holidays last year, in terms of cybersecurity, revenues, growth, page load speeds and downtime. It also investigates how ecommerce professionals feel about their hosting strategy and infrastructure, as well as the top issues affecting their business.

Some key insights from the report include:

• Revenue and Traffic: While only 34.9% of online merchants expected more than 2X their average monthly site traffic during the holiday season, 41.8% actually ended up at 2X or higher. These numbers become more significant given that more than 29% of online merchants generate almost 50% of their annual revenue during the fourth quarter.
• Downtime: 24.3% of merchants experienced expensive downtime in excess of 5 minutes on Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2019, while 6.6% of storefronts crashed for more than 30 minutes. In our pre-holiday survey though, only 18.6% of merchants said that they were worried about impending downtime during the holiday shopping season. 
• Slowness: A pre-holiday survey revealed that 37.2% of online merchants were worried about slow page loads. However, 49.7% of them experienced page load times in excess of 3 seconds, 22.2% had page load times over 5 seconds, and 4.8% had intolerable page load speeds over 9 seconds.  
• Security issues: Last year, 21% of merchants admitted to experiencing cybersecurity-related incidents, ranging from DDoS attacks to credit card theft attempts, during the Cyber Weekend. This year, the number increased to 32.6%, a significant percentage of the hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites operating globally. 
• Hosting Challenges: 12.9% of online merchants cited cyberthreats as their #1 challenge on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, 9.4% of merchants were plagued by downtime worries, and 8.9% stated site slowdowns were their biggest concern. Over 18% of respondents reported heavy struggles with all three challenges.

“While we saw some improvements this year, indicating that ecommerce merchants are investing more seriously in their site performance, many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats, finding it difficult to manage the infrastructure themselves, or working with providers who lack the depth of cloud expertise to deliver a superior user experience,” said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale. “Webscale delivered its sixth flawless year of execution for over 1800 storefronts, most surpassing their sales and traffic forecasts.”

The full report expands on this data and provides a comparison with page load speeds, downtime, security, and infrastructure priorities’ data from 2018, as well as insights on what online merchants were expecting to see in 2019 before the holiday season began.

Download the 2019 State of Ecommerce Infrastructure report now.

For more information on Webscale’s award-winning cloud platform, visit www.webscale.com.

About Webscale

Webscale, the “Any Platform” Commerce Cloud, is the leader in cloud management, hosting, and automation for digital commerce businesses. Delivered as-a-Service, the Webscale platform allows businesses of all sizes to benefit from infinite scalability, load balancing, high performance, outage prevention, improved security, and simple management in multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network), Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Partner), and Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Partner Network). Webscale enables digital transformation for B2C, B2B, and B2E e-commerce and enterprise customers in seven countries and for seven of the Fortune 1000 businesses, and seven of the Internet Retailer Top 500. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with offices in Boulder, CO, and Bangalore, India.

For more information, visit www.webscale.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Media Contact
Andrew Humber
Webscale
pr@webscale.com
+1 (408) 416 7943