E-Commerce Pricing Glitches: The Revenue-Sapping Culprit

It’s estimated that 25 percent of the world’s population already shops online, and with more customers participating in e-commerce daily, that number is expected to reach 2.14 billion people by 2021. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that a typical e-commerce platform processes hundreds of thousands of transactions every day.

E-commerce platforms also undergo a host of other changes continuously — e.g., new product listings, and changes in product prices and promotions, which adds complexity and can result in brand-damaging errors.

In this competitive e-commerce landscape, a single misstep in any of these activities can have a disproportionately large impact on the organization. For example, imagine the financial implications if a website’s sales system fails, allowing customers to place orders for items at unintentionally discounted prices.

Knowing this, it should be no surprise that it’s essential for e-commerce platforms and online stores to run smoothly, including having prices in order.

Simple computer glitches can cause pricing errors that may excite consumers, but cause major problems down the line. Consider when retail behemoth Amazon.com accidentally slashed the price on a popular steam mop by 90 percent thanks to a "deal of the day" glitch, or when Walmart’s website experienced a massive price glitch that caused hundreds of usually expensive items, including treadmills and computer monitors, to be marked down to single- and double-digit prices.

Errors like these are unfortunate. They damage brand reputation and sacrifice revenue unnecessarily, sometimes accounting for upwards of millions of dollars.

So, why aren’t these price glitches caught in real time?

Price glitches are bound to happen. And as a result, consumers often flood the site and make purchases as fast as the glitch occurs. Unfortunately, the majority of e-commerce platforms still rely on traditional monitoring tools that have inherent latency issues. This means, discovering a price glitch is usually left to an employee who just happens to notice abnormal behavior on a business dashboard. At that point, millions in lost revenue can occur. It can take hours for employees to manually check their online channels and dashboard.

It’s time organizations consider a new and thoughtful approach to preventing these price glitches and save money.

In order to eliminate revenue-sapping incidents, like price glitching, organizations need to prepare their website infrastructure well in advance. This also includes being prepared for significant increases in traffic and sales volume — at any time of year. However, staying on top of the massive amounts of data that drive decision-making sales can be difficult for an e-commerce platform to do.

But with newer, advanced technologies in the industry that help monitor business metrics and sort through data in real time, glitches that leak revenue can be stopped in their tracks before they spiral out of control. Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining traction in all sorts of industries. Implementing it can help keep website coding up-to-date, continuously monitor for anything suspicious on an e-commerce platform, correlate unexpected events, and take the stress off of employees.

Investing in new technology solutions — whether it be AI or machine learning — will not only protect revenue, but it will also provide shoppers with a seamless customer experience and protect brand integrity.

Avi Avital is vice president of customer success at Anodot. Anodot applies AI to deliver autonomous analytics in real time, across all data types, at enterprise scale.