This holiday eCommerce websites will have even more 3rd party technologies running their shopping experience. Retail Systems Research (RSR) recently reported that large eCommerce sites now use more than 130 third party requests to build a page. These are requests that the retailer has little control over.

So what happens when one of your 3rd party JavaScripts fails during this holiday eCommerce season?  Are you ready?

The GAP company wasn’t. When a Snapchat tag caused problems on GAP websites on Thanksgiving day, their pages took over 30 second to load. Their holiday eCommerce team enjoyed the fun of making a production code change during peak level traffic.

Amazon wasn’t. When an invisible tracking tag caused severe page delays for 3 hours on Amazon Prime Day holiday 2017, they lost an estimated $7 million in holiday eCommerce sales.

The entire retail industry wasn’t. When Doubleclick tags failed in March 2018, retailers experienced 20-30s page load times. The industry lost an estimated $150 millions in sales in a matter of hours.

Top 3 offenders among eCommerce third party JavaScript technologies

Yottaa technology has visibility into how 3rd party technologies are loading across thousands of our clients’ retail sites. We see the category, the vendor, and the average performance of each 3rd party tag running on these websites.

Below are the 3rd party vendor categories that experience the highest number of violations and performance variability.  

Knowing the variability introduced by one of these 3rd party JavaScripts, imagine the risk posed when more than 30 different 3rd party applications are loaded on your site.

In the graph below, you can see a more detailed view of the variability caused by several 3rd party categories, as seen by Yottaa across more than a thousand eCommerce sites. These demonstrate how a single 3rd party can impact website performance or even bring down an eCommerce site.

Yottaa uses this visibility across thousands of sites to identify 3rd party vendor problems, and alert our customers so they can make the appropriate adjustments. Sometimes Yottaa is able to identify these issues before the 3rd party vendors even know the problem exists.  

How to prevent a 3rd party apocalypse this holiday eCommerce season

Even just a few hours of 30 second page load times during the “Cyber Five” holiday could destroy your business. You should be preparing now, during the summer, to ensure an unexpected 3rd party failure doesn’t take down your holiday eCommerce expectations.

Start by identifying the most problematic 3rd party JavaScripts on your site and putting technology and processes in place to control them. Yottaa works with our customers before every holiday to ensure they have the best configurations and processes in place to monitor and optimize their 3rd parties. As a result, our customers are able to identify and correct 3rd party failures in just a few clicks, before their shoppers even know there’s a problem.

Talk to your eCommerce acceleration technology vendor now, before your holiday eCommerce designs are complete. Make sure you are ready to handle 3rd party failures now, so you aren’t the retailer preparing an emergency production code change on Black Friday this year.