Webscale Releases Industry’s First State of E-Commerce
Infrastructure Report

Analysis of the E-Commerce Industry’s Fourth Quarter 2018 Reveals that While Many Merchants saw Growth, Their Businesses were Still Affected by Downtime, Slow Performance, and Cyber Threats

Sunnyvale, CA – February 07, 2019 – Webscale, the E-Commerce Cloud Company, released its inaugural State of E-Commerce Infrastructure Report, which examines findings from a comprehensive survey of more than 350 e-commerce professionals regarding how their online store’s infrastructure performed during the industry’s lucrative fourth quarter (Oct 1 – Dec 31) in 2018.

This report provides valuable insights into the infrastructure challenges faced by e-commerce professionals today, and provides a rare look into where merchants stand versus their peers and competitors in 2019 from a user experience standpoint.

Key highlights from the report include:

• Downtime: 23.85% merchants experienced 5 minutes or more of downtime, while 5.5% storefronts were unavailable for more than 30 minutes.
• Site Slowdowns: 56% online stores experienced page load times of more than 3 seconds. Over 30% saw page load times exceeding 5 seconds. For about 9% e-commerce sites, the loading times were beyond acceptable at 9 seconds or more.
• Security-related incidents: 21% e-commerce storefronts admitted to experiencing security-related incidents: DDoS attacks, fraud, credit card theft attempts, etc. Others likely did but perhaps did not realize their impact.
• Hosting Challenges: 6.4% e-commerce merchants said downtime was their #1 challenge on Black Friday / Cyber Monday, 11.9% had severe site slowdown issues, and 9.2% cited cyber threats as their primary issue. 18.35% online merchants said they were struggling heavily with all three challenges.

The fourth quarter is the most important time of the year for any e-commerce business. Based on the findings of the survey, for 76% e-commerce storefronts, between 20% and 50% of their annual revenue is generated in the fourth quarter, while some disclosed that this was as high as 75%. The substantial increase in traffic during this time of the year is a true litmus test of how effective an e-commerce site’s infrastructure is in delivering a great digital experience, catering to shopper demand, and supporting the needs of the business.

“Even with the best design and code, many e-commerce sites experience downtime or become painfully slow during the busy holiday season due to unpredictable, massive traffic surges. Hackers attempting to hijack sites or steal credit card data only make matters more challenging,“ said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale. “To maximize their revenues and protect highly confidential customer data, merchants need to be looking at a cloud-based hosting infrastructure, coupled with best-of-breed solutions that automate and improve site performance, security, and uptime.”

Download the complete State of E-Commerce Infrastructure report here.

With more than 1,000 storefronts in the public cloud, Webscale offers the only cloud hosting and management solution that delivers 100% uptime, 360-degree security, and blazing fast performance, as well as control, visibility, proactive support, and a host of important features purpose-built for e-commerce.

For more information about Webscale’s award-winning E-Commerce Cloud platform, visit www.webscale.com.

Research methodology:
E-commerce professionals were invited to participate in an electronic survey asking them how their online stores performed during the holiday shopping season in terms of revenues, growth, site performance, uptime, and security. The survey also investigated how they feel about their current hosting environments, top issues they face, and infrastructure solutions they would like to invest in.

A total of 358 participants completed the global survey.

About Webscale
Webscale is the E-Commerce Cloud Company and a pioneer in integrated web application delivery in the cloud. Delivered as-a-Service, the Webscale platform allows businesses of all sizes to benefit from application scalability, load balancing, high performance, outage prevention, improved security, and simple management in multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Webscale creates powerful solutions for e-commerce and enterprise customers across multiple platforms such as Magento, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others. E-commerce storefronts in seven countries and five of the Fortune 1000 businesses use the Webscale platform. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with offices in Boulder, CO, and Bangalore, India.

For more information, visit www.webscale.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Media Contact:
Andrew Humber
Webscale
ahumber@webscalenetworks.com
+1 (408) 416 7943