Beyond basic URLs, e-retail sites move toward transaction monitoring

Most e-commerce sites already monitor the availability and load time of core site elements such as the home page, but many are now moving beyond such basic monitoring to monitor the performance of web transactions, Ken Godskind, vice president of marketing at web performance monitoring service AlertSite, tells Internet Retailer. Godskind says that among AlertSite clients, “A huge number have migrated over the last year or two from basic web site URL monitoring to more sophisticated web site transaction monitoring.”

Though more expensive than simply monitoring the performance of a few selected URLs, “The ROI is that if you are going to recognize the errors that affect your end users, you need to monitor your site as if you were an end user,” Godskind says.

Godskind notes that on many e-retail sites the home page is static and doesn’t interact with all back-end systems that the retailer depends on to drive purchases. Under that scenario, while monitoring a home page might show that it is up and running, such monitoring would provide no idea of the performance of other key applications in the purchase process. By contrast, transaction monitoring looks at a multi-step process that involves visiting a number of URLs on the site, including cookies, tracking information, or session IDs difficult to monitor by visiting a static URL.

Transaction monitoring isn`t the only way to test the performance of back-end systems, Godskind says, noting that some e-retailers create special pages on their sites to interact with–and register the performance of–various parts of the back-end system. But while that tracks the performance of individual elements of the back-end environment, “It’s not the same as going to the web site, searching the catalog, selecting an item, putting it in the cart, providing your user ID and password and completing checkout,” he says. “If you are not monitoring the processes as the customer interacts with them, sometimes you miss things that would affect customers.”