Elevating E-Commerce: Why Quality of Experience is the Key to Success
It’s no secret the e-commerce industry is experiencing significant growth, with 23 percent of retail purchases expected to occur online by 2027. That number should be higher, as today nearly 71 percent of online shopping carts get abandoned, often due to user experience (UX) issues such as trouble creating accounts, pauses or delays related to product searches, failed credit card payments or authentication, and other disturbances.
These abandoned carts and UX issues are in large part due to a hard truth: many online retailers don’t focus on the experiences of their visitors.
Online retailers have traditionally focused on measuring quality of service (QoS). This can be a useful metric, but it only reflects the performance of the backed systems that support apps. The reason many organizations focus on these backend metrics is because that’s what tools their technology and operations teams focus on, including their observability tools. However, to understand the true experience of all customers using an application, teams should shift their focus on a more modern alternative metric: quality of experience (QoE).
The Pitfalls of a Backend-Only Focus
QoS is an evaluation of technical performance metrics, such as latency, traffic, errors and crashes. While backend signals like these are important for operational efficiency, they often fail to reflect the broader, daily user experience and don’t account for critical business metrics, including customer experience and satisfaction.
Prioritizing backend systems leaves a gap in understanding how customers are experiencing an e-commerce platform in real time. Neglecting this gap results in customer dissatisfaction and inefficient operations. This gap leaves blind spots where suboptimal or negative user experience remains invisible. It generates noise from alerts that have no impact on users. It results in out-of-control big data costs with many disconnected tools consuming and analyzing massive quantities of data that have little impact on user experiences. Issues often surface in social media posts or app store reviews. Ultimately, they impact revenue and brand reputation.
The Solution Lies in QoE
QoE measures the overall satisfaction and usability of a service from the customer’s perspective. It accounts for the UX issues that impact customers daily, including quick and easy product search/navigation, seamless checkouts and payments, and responsive customer service. Real-time visibility into all users’ actions from their endpoint devices — i.e., the phones or web browsers they’re using to interact with their apps — with instant root-cause analysis pinpointing the app or system performance issue that's causing the problem is key to understanding and enhancing the quality of experience.
This real-time visibility and actionability begins by looking at specific user flows, such as “time from product detail page to add to cart,” which measures how quickly customers add a product to their cart after viewing a page and is influenced by page load times. Another vital metric — time from checkout start to payment success — tracks the efficiency of the checkout process and is essential to reducing cart abandonment.
When visitors encounter experience issues like slow load times or frequent errors related to their product searches, they have an increased likelihood of abandoning their carts and turning to a competitor. Studies show that a “small” issue such as a one-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7 percent. By focusing on their users’ real-time QoE metrics, retailers gain valuable insight into user flows that allows them to ensure the easiest path to purchase, all while providing customers with a more seamless and enjoyable online experience.
UX issues happen every day and impact a broader number of online customers than larger outages alone. When deciding whether to make the change to QoE, retailers must ask themselves what the cost of an ongoing bad experience is to their brand.
Embracing the Shift
Consistently delivering high QoE helps online retailers build a favorable brand reputation, drive customer retention, and increase sales. When users find an e-commerce platform easy to navigate and encounter minimal, if any, issues, they're more likely to have a positive experience and complete a purchase vs. users who encounter many issues.
As the e-commerce industry evolves, it’s time that companies make the shift to measuring QoE, which will help retailers stay ahead of the competition and build stronger relationships with customers, foster loyalty, and increase their bottom line.
Aditya Ganjam is the co-founder and chief product officer at Conviva, the world's first operational data platform.
As Conviva’s chief product officer and co-founder, Aditya Ganjam leads the product management team and drives product strategy for the world’s first experience-centric operational monitoring and analytics platform. He has been instrumental in bringing Conviva’s paradigm-shifting stateful analytics approach to digital businesses across industries, addressing the growing challenge of connecting system performance, customer experience, and engagement directly to business outcomes. He is a founder of Conviva, where he has spent his entire professional career, initially as a lead engineer followed by progressively more senior engineering roles, before becoming the company’s chief product officer, responsible for overseeing product definition, technology strategy, and new product incubation. Before co-founding Conviva, Aditya was a doctoral candidate studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where as a member of the End System Multicast (ESM) project he played a key role in building the world’s first peer-to-peer live streaming system. Aditya earned his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in computer science from CMU.
