Holiday Prep: Performance Monitoring Extension for Magento Retailers

In ecommerce, website performance is everything. Not only will 57 percent of consumers abandon a website after waiting 3 seconds, but 80 percent of them will also never return.

This holiday season, it's imperative that retailers monitor their site's software and business analytics in order to prevent bottlenecks and understand how performance issue can hurt their bottom line. 

In preparation for the busiest shopping season of the year, Magento, an eBay Enterprise company, and New Relic, a software analytics company, have partnered to release a new extension for the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud, designed to provide customers with a deeper understanding of their applications' performance and customer engagement activities. The extension is available on the Magento Connect marketplace for both the Enterprise Edition and Community Edition platforms.

"Real-time performance is a critical consideration for online retailers," said John Gray, senior vice president of business development, New Relic. "Our partnership with Magento brings the power of software analytics to Magento users, including real-time, customized dashboards that show customer engagement data and other elements impacting their business. With New Relic, Magento customers can make data-driven decisions to improve performance and business results."

It's important retailers of all sizes to fix and find potential potential issues in their applications and third-party extensions this holiday season, as Monetate reports that the average bounce rate in Q1 2015 (35.25 percent) was nearly 6 percentage points higher than it was at the end of Q1 2014, which isn't good news for retailers with under-performing sites. Retailers cannot give consumers an easy out this holiday season as there are too many other options for them to choose from.