The holiday shopping season is now in full swing with consumers all over the world hunting for great deals and low prices to counter rising costs of living. With milestone shopping days such as Singles’ Day and Black Friday having already taken place, shoppers in Singapore are now turning their attention to the traditional seasonal sales which run throughout Christmas and the Chinese New Year.
At Cisco AppDynamics, we recently conducted global research (across 12 countries) looking at online shopping habits around this time of year. In Singapore, we found that 94% of consumers will be relying on online shopping applications and services during the holiday period and 88% report that they typically wait for online shopping dates and holiday season sales to take advantage of discounts and low-cost deals. With inflation looming, our research results reflect that consumers are now being more strategic when they shop.
Shoppers relying on holiday deals and discounts with financial pressures mounting
Significantly, our research reveals the extent to which appetite and demand for these types of offers is even higher than usual. 97% of consumers state that it is more important for them to find great deals this year, given the rising costs of living, economic slowdown and increasing inflation.
Whether they’re shopping for gifts for friends and family, party food and drinks, household essentials, or new devices and appliances, people are looking for the very best deals they can get. And this means that they’re setting aside established brand preferences and loyalties and engaging with new retailers that are offering the lowest prices and most compelling deals.
For online retailers, the current period represents a massive and immediate opportunity to engage new customers and drive revenue ahead of what is likely to be a challenging year ahead, as many countries move into recession. Competition will be fierce in this environment, and brands know that they will need to offer fantastic deals to attract customers to their applications and digital services.
Digital experience is now as important as price for shoppers
However, shoppers are looking for more than low prices. 99% of consumers in Singapore state that it is important that shopping apps and digital services provide a fast and seamless experience without any delays or disruption, which is the highest among all the regions we surveyed. They know that they need to move quickly to secure the best deals and they don’t have the time or patience to deal with poorly performing applications. Indeed, 72% of people admit that if the applications and digital services that they will be using to find great deals this holiday season fail to perform, it will leave them feeling anxious and angry.
Whether it’s sign-in issues, poor stock availability, payment processing issues or product pages being slow to load or unresponsive, shoppers are unwilling to accept problems they encounter when they’re hunting for deals. Great digital experience is no longer seen as a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s regarded as an essential. In fact, 86% of consumers state that the experience they get when using a shopping app is just as important as the deals that are on offer.
Shoppers will turn their back on retailers that deliver poor digital experiences this holiday season
As people have relied on applications and digital services more and more over recent years, many have been exposed to the very best, most intuitive and personalised digital experiences available. They’ve become far more knowledgeable and sophisticated in their use of applications and developed firm ideas about how all applications can and should now perform.
And as people’s expectations when using applications have risen, their reactions when they encounter poor digital experiences have become far more extreme. It may be the holiday season but shoppers are in no mood to forgive and forget application performance issues this year - 72% state that retail brands have only one shot to impress them and that if their digital service doesn’t perform, they won’t use it again.
This finding alone should ring alarm bells for retail leaders all over the world - if their applications and supporting infrastructure are unable to cope with spikes in demand and they can’t deliver seamless digital experiences at all times, then they risk seeing more than half of their customers walk away, possibly never to return.
Technologists need visibility into cloud-native environments to ensure seamless digital experiences
As is always the case at this time of year, IT departments will be braced for a busy and highly pressured few months. Technologists will be working around the clock to ensure that applications and digital services are able to stand up to dramatic spikes in demand.
Without doubt, however, managing IT availability and performance has become increasingly challenging over the last couple of years. Digital transformation since the beginning of the pandemic has seen retail organisations accelerate adoption of cloud-native technologies. The result of this is IT teams having to manage hugely complex cloud-native application architectures and, in most cases, struggling to generate visibility and insight into their applications and infrastructure running on public clouds.
These highly distributed systems utilise thousands of containers, generating an incredible volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) telemetry every second. IT teams simply don’t have the tools to make sense of this mass of data and therefore they can’t quickly troubleshoot application and performance issues that span hybrid environments. Technologists are operating in a constant state of crisis, scrambling to identify and fix performance issues before they affect end users.
Therefore, it’s so important for retailers to implement a modern, cloud-native observability solution which enables their IT teams to manage and optimise increasingly complex and dynamic applications and technology stacks. They need a solution that allows them to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape.
With real-time insights from the business transaction’s telemetry data, technologists can easily identify the root cause of issues and expedite resolution, ensuring that their applications are providing customers with seamless digital experiences at all times.
Perhaps more than ever before, this holiday season is absolutely critical for retailers. With the possibility of an economic slowdown on the horizon, Singapore’s retailers need to take advantage of heightened consumer demand for low price offers. But business and IT leaders have to recognise that low prices on their own are not enough. Only by combining great deals with seamless digital experiences will they be able to maximise this unprecedented opportunity.
