Internet Disruptions Cost E-Commerce Retailers Millions Annually

March 28, 2023 at 09:00 AM EDT

Independent Survey Commissioned by Catchpoint quantifies the consequences of having insufficient Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) capabilities

Catchpoint^®, The Internet Resilience Company™, today released the results of a survey of large retail and consumer brands showing the high cost of Internet disruptions on their businesses. The survey, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Catchpoint, shows that nearly 40% of all respondents suffer customer-impacting disruptions, which cost up to $1 million per month.

Key findings from the survey include:

61% of respondents said Internet disruptions (defined as downtime or latency) have resulted in lost revenue, while 64% reported damage to their brand’s reputation and led to lack of consumer confidence from these disruptions.
39% of respondents said Internet disruptions cost their company between $500,000 to $999,000 due to lost revenue, compensation to customers and extra time spent fixing the issues. 12% stated that it costs their company more than $1M.
65% of respondents reported that even small disruptions in the flow of commerce can cause customers to halt their purchase cycle, highlighting the importance of identifying and resolving Internet disruptions.

In addition to asking respondents about disruptions and their consequences, the survey examined states of readiness for disciplined Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). Notably, respondents reported:

Only 29% of their companies monitor the full “Internet Stack” (routers, firewalls, ISPs, DNS, CDNs, cloud services, website payment providers, video hosting services, etc.), resulting in an average of 76 disruptions per month due to inadequate visibility.
61% feel they require tools to anticipate, detect, and fix Internet performance problems quickly, indicating a need for better management of Internet performance.
74% say that customers have little tolerance for disrupted experiences and 71% say employees expect the same frictionless digital experiences as customers.

"The survey findings make a strong case for IPM, quantifying the consequences of not closely monitoring all aspects of a customer’s experience and addressing issues before they happen,” said Howard Beader, Vice President of Product Marketing at Catchpoint. “Monitoring the entire Internet Stack isn’t easy, with thousands of blind spots that could become disruptions or affect experience, but clearly failure to do so is having a material impact on businesses profitability and productivity.”

Forrester completed the online survey in February 2023, and had 262 respondents who hold director-level or higher roles in IT, CX, digital business operations, e-commerce, engineering/development, and marketing/advertising, and who are responsible for e-commerce strategy and technology in the consumer products goods and retail industries across North America, Europe, and APAC. The focus was on consumer brands and retailers with a significant volume of online transactions and a company size of 1,000+ employees.

For more information regarding this study, please join us on March 29^th at 2pm EDT for a webinar with guest speaker, Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester, Sucharita Kodali.

About Catchpoint: Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company^TM. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. The Catchpoint platform offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.