Introduction:

Today, every e-commerce business is deeply immersed in leveraging technology to build applications & products for their customers. Critical processes, from the customer’s ordering experience to the shipping and delivery experience, are run by complex software applications designed to drive automation, exceptional customer experience, and operational efficiency.

This piece delves deep into the essence, and intricate details of monitoring the critical journeys in E-commerce, and how you can use Dr. Droid to get intelligent alerts before your customers are impacted.

Part 1: Use cases for E-commerce platforms

Imagine having a key marketing campaign launch at a sports match and then seeing a spike in traffic, but no revenue growth. It's something that needs instant attention and needs to be caught before it becomes a challenge.

In our experience of working with multiple e-commerce companies, here are some of the top places where teams are investing to track in real-time:

1. Order counts and revenue: Tracking average order counts, revenue per order, identifying if there's any anomaly in the discounts being applied or inventories going out of stock. Any minor change in configurations, logics or a back gate identified by users, could lead to pilferages that need to be identified at the earliest!

   

2. Conversion Funnels & metrics: Keeping tight track of metrics, especially ones relating to sensitive components, like promo-code / coupons, and payments.

   

3. Shipment status and delays: Tracking the journey of shipments and identifying ones that are not on track to be delivered. A single process in e-commerce could happen across a couple of minutes to a few hours and even days. Issues are often due to delays between consecutive steps in the process or due to missing/incorrect actions at some of the steps. These are hard to track and end up being escalated by customers or internal teams, more often than not.

   

Part 2: Benefits of having strong monitoring in place

1. Improved conversions:

Identifying deviations and anomalies in order counts or revenue, due to payment integrations, new code changes or any other code changes.

2. Fraud detections:

Identifying pilferages due to miscreant users, coupon code leakages, revenue calculation, or such related issues.

3. Improved NPS:

Streamlined and error-free processes significantly augment the quality of products/services and customer interactions, culminating in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Risk mitigation by reducing MTTR:

Having consistent visibility on your critical business processes in your application can promptly detect anomalies or irregularities, allowing your team to avert business disruptions due to and ensure continuous compliance with industry regulations and standards.

5. Data-driven Decision-Making:

The analytical insight provided by the tool can empower decision-makers with clearer visibility of operational aspects, facilitating informed and data-driven decisions that propel organizational growth.

6. Increased Profitability:

By refining operational efficiency and reducing process-related errors and delays, process monitoring can substantially curtail operational costs and enhance profitability.

Part 3: A Glimpse into Dr. Droid and how we make it easy to track metrics in real-time

Using Dr. Droid, you can track all the critical metrics and journeys associated with your business and operations.

No-code integration

You can transform your logs to track transactions across multiple sync/async checkpoints. Here are the top 3 ways you can get started:

• Connect to your log stream and send JSONs to Dr. Droid

• Send us your backend events (via segment, Kinesis or SDK)

• Connect directly to your database and join across multiple tables / databases

Create Funnels & complex metrics

For an e-commerce company, the payment journey is one of the most crucial business processes. It governs the user's journey from selecting products to finally making a purchase. Let's delve deeper into its intricacies.

To experience the demo, you can check out the sandbox (playground) here.

Part 4: Risks to Business KPIs/Metrics if the checkout process is not well monitored

1. Increased Cart Abandonment Rates: Without monitoring the checkout workflow, there could be unidentified bottlenecks causing users to abandon their carts which would directly impact sales.

2. Inventory Mismanagement: If the inventory check isn't accurate, it could lead to overselling or stock wastage impacting both revenue and costs.

3. Payment Failures: Any hiccup in the payment process can result in lost sales. Monitoring can identify consistent issues with certain payment gateways or transaction types.

4. Delayed Order Confirmations: If users don't receive timely confirmation, it can lead to customer dissatisfaction and increased customer service inquiries.

5. Reputation Damage: Frequent issues in the checkout process can lead to negative user reviews and damage the brand's reputation.

Doctor Droid assists companies in monitoring critical KPIs associated with the operations and product, helping companies keep the focus on customer experience.

Our team has deep experience in helping companies setup their monitoring and observability stack, so if you need any assistance in setting it up, we are happy to assist. You can reach out to us, here.