Online Retailers Risk Losing Their Grip on $7.7B of Revenue During the Holiday "Devember Season", Reports Cedexis
With a billion Black Friday user sessions tallied, global traffic specialists project increased Internet traffic through the holidays, with the whole $120B holiday revenue pot at risk due to Internet chaos
PORTLAND, Ore., Dec. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Cedexis, the leader in crowd-optimized application and content delivery for clouds, CDNs and data centers, today shared data and analysis from a record-breaking Black Friday that reveals the continued need for, attention to, and improvement of, application delivery strategies. Significant volume spikes Internet-wide led to Cedexis receiving real user measurements from more than1 billion user sessions, representing a significant portion of the activity of the estimated 3.58 billion total worldwide Internet users.
More significantly, analysis of traffic patterns in the weeks after Black Friday reveal convincingly that the traffic surge was by no means temporary, but is rather holding strong through the late November to late December - Devember - period. Cedexis analysis and projections strongly suggest that global traffic will peak in the week beginning December 11, then work its way back to pre-Black Friday levels immediately after Christmas Day. During that period, Deloitte estimates merrymakers will spend at least $120B on holiday-related online purchases.
"Accessing more than a billion user sessions for the first time is a small but meaningful milestone for Cedexis," commented Ryan Windham, Cedexis CEO. "It is a reflection not only of the frenzy of online shoppers, but also of the breadth of enterprises that have entrusted their traffic monitoring and management to our company. As retailers compete for their fair share of the $120B pot, our analysis shows that nearly $8B is in danger of being lost by first-choice retailers to their competitors if Internet delivery isn't properly tuned."
On Black Friday itself, some 6.4 percent of all traffic requests experienced 10 percent or more packet loss - a level at which disruption to the purchase path is virtually assured. Assuming this trend continues through the Devember period, 6.4 percent of $120B in revenue ($7.68B) will be transferred from e-tailers who haven't tuned their traffic to those who have. For businesses with high advertising, distribution, and fulfillment costs, such a transfer could devastate long-range planning.
Response times - the delay separating a customer request and the response being sent back to their device - were broadly distributed. While the swiftest delivery networks were able to sustain a response time in the 30 to 40 millisecond range most of the day, the slowest required nearly twice the time to serve customers:
- The least fleet of the large US providers only managed to improve on 70 milliseconds for about an hour, and hovered closer to 75 milliseconds for most of the day.
Predictably, those customers served by delivery networks in other nations saw lags that would have been very noticeable:
- Traffic coming from Germany had a disappointing response time of around 160 milliseconds.
- Australia had a response time of a strikingly pedestrian 280 milliseconds.
Past a certain point, high response times become indistinguishable from total unavailability to shoppers, causing them to take their business elsewhere.
"The Internet is not an on/off proposition, any more than Black Friday is a one-and-done sales opportunity," advised Josh Gray, Chief Architect at Cedexis. "What our data shows is that, just because you don't read about an outage on Twitter, doesn't mean there aren't thousands of potential buyers running into roadblocks and taking their business elsewhere. During what is gearing up to be a record-setting Devember, the only way for e-tailers to ensure they don't lose their share of the $7.68B that is likely to be up for grabs is to actively and intelligently manage the selection of the ideal pathway through the Internet between their service and their buyer."
To learn more about Cedexis and its services, visit: www.cedexis.com
About Cedexis
Cedexis provides web-scale, end-user-experience monitoring and real-time traffic routing across multiple clouds and networks. Cedexis Radar crowd sources billions of real user measurements (RUM) a day from a community of thousands of popular websites and mobile apps, with traffic routing services based on the insights this data provides, for the best performance, availability, and cost. Trusted by nearly 1,000 global brands including Microsoft, A&E, Accor Hotels, Airbus, Hudl, Comcast, LinkedIn, Mozilla, and Nissan. Cedexis is headquartered in Portland, Oregon with offices in Paris, France; San Francisco, CA; Brooklyn, NY; and London, UK.
Media Contacts
Jacqueline Velasco
Lumina Communications on behalf of Cedexis
E-mail: [email protected]
Tel: (408) 680-0564
SOURCE Cedexis
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