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PRICELESS INKJET CARTRIDGES - E-Commerce
Highlights:
PIC needed to maintain uninterrupted and seamless functioning of the different web-components involved in a typical e-business transaction to ensure effortless shopping experience for its millions of Customers, and to build their confidence and loyalty.
WebSitePulse Transaction Monitoring provided continuous and objective web-components' performance measurement, resulting in instant and precise detection of potential malfunctions, shorter downtimes, and prevention of considerable loss of traffic and revenues.
The Challenge:
Ensure seamless e-business transactions while keeping the operational costs down through outsourcing.
PIC is one of the largest virtual stores for printing supplies worldwide.
Returning Customers generate more than 70% of the revenue, while the website has almost zero advertising budget. Customer loyalty, as well as PIC reputation, are based on the huge selection of brands and items, excellent customer service, and risk- and hassle-free shopping experience. Therefore, for PIC owners, the seamless functioning of their website has always been a top priority, and major concern.
The other building block of PIC success is pricing. The low price levels are achieved through supply chain optimization and through outsourcing. Indeed, most of the critical functions of the e-commerce website complex back-end are provided by various vendors often situated in different countries, different time zones, and speaking different languages.
To the end-user, buying a cartridge is an easy, step-by-step process of research of the product, comparison, selection, ordering, payment, and execution. To the PIC IT experts it is coordination and integration of multiple service providers who are totally independent from each other, automated and remote.
PIC owners were committed to their business model, but wanted to implement a cost-effective solution that would minimize the risk of loss of credibility, Customer loyalty, and revenue due to potential malfunction of some of the outsourced web-components.
The Solution:
WSP Multi-point Transaction Monitoring
"Our average cost per downtime minute is a four digits number.
All of our efforts and on-line reputation could be destroyed in less than 3 hours, if our website is down or our customers just cannot make the purchase they came to us for. With the Internet offering so many alternative choices, Customer loyalty is our most valuable asset. But loyalty has its limitations too, and if the transactions fail, we could not blame our clients. Therefore, we wanted to be the first to know if something with the website went wrong.
WebSitePulse offered their Transaction Monitoring solution that measured the performance of each of the web-components involved in a typical e-business transaction: database servers, shopping cart, credit card service etc. Monitoring each of the steps of the transaction was offered from multiple locations simultaneously, narrowing further down the possible sources of the problem.
In summary: we would know of a potential problem five minutes after its occurrence. We would also know which web-component caused the trouble, and - if our vendor used multiple datacenters for its services - we would be able to tell in what geographical area had the malfunction occurred. Our IT people would start troubleshooting within the first 10 minutes while a kind apology page would be displayed on our website instead of the ugly and disappointing: "This page is currently unavailable".
We have about 10 crashes per year, and who doesn't have them nowadays.
With WSP Transaction Monitoring, our downtime is reduced by 91%. The money saved so far would be enough for us to keep WSP services for the next 130 years, even if, all of a sudden the Internet would become perfect and our website would be always available."
The Result:
Monitoring each of the mission-critical web-components allowed PIC to take advantage of its outsourced model and to keep its overall pricing at a very competitive level.
Upon the receipt of WebSitePulse immediate alert notifications, troubleshooting was efficient and focused, because of the precision of the provided performance measurement data.
Even when no interruptions or malfunctions had happened, the information provided by WSP monitoring agent and summarized in the customizable analytical Reports allowed PIC owners to review the various vendors' performance. They were able to make informed decisions, and pro-actively eliminate potential "weak links" and "bottlenecks" in the operational cycle.
Savings from reduced downtime were the immediate result from using WSP service.
However, Customers' loyalty based on consistently excellent experience with PIC website is the greatest gain and a solid basis for the PIC future growth.
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