Ecommerce applications and platforms have always been popular but the post-pandemic era has amplified their predominance, exponentially. As people are still shying away from visiting offline stores, the time might just be appropriate to bring in a barrage of actionable, resourceful, and aesthetic mobile applications.
Why Ecommerce Applications Deserve the Most Attention?
Despite the essentiality of service-based web and mobile applications, 2020 has mostly been about eCommerce applications, owing to the round the clock support and accessibility offered by them. With individuals relying on new and used products for managing office errands, daily chores, and professional timelines, the importance of product-based services has scaled beyond contemplation.
While this might just be the right time to ideate, design, and develop an eCommerce application, either something on the lines of Flyp or Amazon, it is essential to steer clear of the rudimentary mistakes and make provisions for the same.
Basic Ecommerce App Creation Mistakes to Counter
- Overreliance on Web Apps
Despite envisioning progressive web apps, there remains a need for a mobile-centric identity. Developers fail to segregate web and mobile as two separate domains which in turn make way for compatibility issues with buyers treating mobile interfaces as a smaller version of the web platforms.
- Lack of Personalization
Regardless of the nature of the eCommerce application, it is necessary for the same to have attributes housing saved purchases, shopping histories, purchase trends, previous search databases, and easy navigation systems. Even if you are planning to set up an app for used products, there should be an option for the users to validate the seller's credibility.
- Low-Quality Inclusions
Middling images, subpar layout, and restricted feature sets can negatively impact your application, especially during traffic surfaces. Besides, signup walls, infinite scrolling, limited payment avenues, and higher interaction costs are some of the other detrimental issues to account for.
In addition to the mentioned eCommerce app development issues, you also need to avoid setting up obsolete search features and incorporate accessible key functions for making navigation and app usage easier than ever. However, there are a few extrinsic factors that might negatively impact the app's performance. These include:
- Slower networks
- Inaccurate bandwidth allocation
- Dynamic content and the associated lags
- Last-mile bottlenecks and packet drops
The Role of Application Monitoring
Despite enlisting the issues related to eCommerce app development, it is natural for the newbies to miss out on certain insights and create something that isn’t the most interactive and usable piece of IT solution. This is where Application Monitoring comes into the mix as it gauges the performance of an app with the sole purpose of making it more usable, especially for the end-user.
Application Monitoring takes both intrinsic and extrinsic aspects into account, whilst suggesting performance improvement and better app management strategies. To sum it up, Application Monitoring keeps a track of application dependencies, user experience, and code-based performances to make the eCommerce applications, even more impactful.
Why Application Monitoring is necessary for eCommerce Apps?
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Be it selling and buying new or even used products, eCommerce strategy is definitely the need of the hour, considering the reliance of individuals on essential products. However, as mentioned previously, eCommerce applications have the maximum chances of going sideways, especially when design and development are concerned.
However, Application Monitoring can help developers redeem themselves by scrutinizing the diverse aspects of the application, including its stead over particular networking, CPU usage, data output, memory demands, code-level performances, and other app metrics. In simpler terms, APM troubleshoots application issues and reveals the performance-centric bottlenecks.
How does Application Monitoring work?
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Before proceeding, we must know that Application Performance Monitoring reveals the issues but not the actual reasons behind the same. Here are the features that make APM a sought-after IT resource:
1. Ability to monitor transactions and web requests
APM has the requisite architecture to monitor the server access details, speed of requests, and even the transactional access.
2. Monitoring Dependencies
This feature takes note of the app's performances during traffic spikes. The emphasis, therefore, is on monitoring SQL queries, HTTP service, the performance of the SQL database, and cloud-centric issues, if any.
3. Cloud-Level Profiling
APM also monitors the cloud-centric performances and showcasing the slowness, if any, bugs, and the errors in play. Besides, even explicit requests are monitored to analyze the speed and relevant strategies to amplify performances.
4. Server Monitoring
APM takes the memory and CPU metrics into account, which eventually reveals the scalability bottlenecks associated with the application, either as an on-premise solution or a cloud-centric one.
5. Log Data Monitoring
Application performance monitoring is all about monitoring the logs for finding the issues via the analytics. Log management associated with APM also gives you the ability to retrace steps and understand the nature of the problems.
6. Application Error Monitoring
APM monitors the nature of app errors and can subsequently help developers plan out the next course of action. Some of the aligned feature sets associated with APM includes alerting, reporting, and error tracking.
7. RUM or ‘Real User Monitoring’
This passive APM feature helps developers monitor the JavaScript associated with the application and even the time it takes to load, render, and process web content.
In addition to these features which are more inclined towards standardized application metrics, APM also offers the flexibility of monitoring customized or curated metrics.
Is There Something Better to Monitor Performances?
While Application Performance Monitoring is a highly relevant resource, it only identifies the problem and doesn’t let you get into the fiber of the same. This is where Application Performance Management comes in as a handy eCommerce tool that analyzes the crux of the app-based redundancies, web and mobile traffic, error rates, deployment history, and server instances to make the app more usable.
Application Performance Management offers an in-depth analysis of the code-level app performances and helps developers understand the nature of the problems, whilst allowing them to make the necessary changes to the eCommerce application.
Bottom-Line
While Application Monitoring is an app development asset, especially if you are looking to revisit and realign your eCommerce application as per the latest standards, it comes under the Application Performance Management umbrella. Therefore, it wouldn’t be wrong to concentrate on the latter to understand more about the nature of the issues instead of superficially analyzing the constraints.