Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
As the new year progresses, more reports are available about e-commerce activity and performance for 2016. These reports have identified some major e-commerce trends that developed last year, and it’s worth taking the time to review them and see how you can use the information you glean to improve your operations this year. Before you know it, the festive season will be here, so now is a good time to consider adapting to these trends while you’re not as busy as you will be later in the year.
Mobile online shopping continues to grow
The trend for consumers to use mobile devices continues to grow, and these figures from the US market are indicative of the trend worldwide. According to Business Insider, mobile devices accounted for holiday sales of $24 billion (£19.5 billion) during the last two months of 2016. Mobile devices accounted for 31% of all online sales in 2016, which is an increase from 25% in 2015 and 14% in 2014. The percentage is expected to grow again in 2017, so you cannot afford not to optimise your e-commerce site for shopping on mobile devices, otherwise, you risk losing customers to your competitors that have mobile-friendly sites. Your customers now expect to have the same experience when shopping on mobile devices as they do on desktops.
Customers want fast website loading times
To provide the best user experience (UX), you need a website that loads quickly. You may have the most attractive website imaginable, but your potential customers will not stick around to experience it if your site does not load quickly. There are many studies available that show the link between fast loading time and increased sales, but a recent study conducted by UK retailer Trainline is instructive. The firm found they experienced a revenue increase of £8 million by reducing the page loading time by 0.3 seconds. Set quick performance standards for your website and consider using a website monitoring service to monitor page loading speed to promptly inform you if you experience any degradation in page loading time.
Customers expect quick delivery
These days, your customers expect fast delivery of their purchases, and five to seven days now seems a very long time to many of them. Of course, both the time and cost it takes to deliver a package depends on the distance it must travel, so consider using multiple warehouses for shipping, and locating those warehouses closer to your customers. This way, you can reduce the average distance a package needs to travel and reduce your shipping costs.
More customers are making purchasing decisions based on reviews
Online shoppers are relying more and more on customer reviews. They are more likely to make a purchase if they see that other customers like the product, so you should encourage your customers to post reviews of their purchases. After a customer makes a purchase, send a follow-up email asking for a review, and if the product met their expectations.
Taking these factors into account will help make you more competitive.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
Engineering
Beyond Uptime: Building a Self-Healing OpenClaw Observability Stack
3 min read The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed
Daniel
April 23, 2026
When AWS us-east-1 Fails, Much of the Internet Fails With It
7 min read There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure,
James Barnes
April 15, 2026
In the Age of AI, Operational Memory Matters Most During Incidents
7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to
James Barnes
April 10, 2026
AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See
10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about
James Barnes
April 2, 2026
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026