This Holiday Season, Don’t Forget to Monitor Your APIs

As the summer draws to a close and back-to-school sales wind down, retailers will soon be focusing their attention on the holiday shopping season. They’ll take special care to ensure that their ecommerce websites remain available and fast under heavy site traffic, protecting both brand and revenue.

Whilst monitoring page load and response times and the Internet infrastructure that supports your online store are critical, modern ecommerce sites are heavily dependent on APIs. Many of a shopper’s earliest interactions with an online storefront are powered by APIs. This includes APIs for site search, product catalog integration, personalization, and recommendation and price comparison engines.

Entering credit card information and shipping choices requires still more API calls. Want to share a purchase on social media after completing a transaction? APIs kick in again. A failure or slowdown anywhere along this chain can derail your customer’s experience and cost you a sale. These APIs need to be tested and monitored regularly as part of your overall ecommerce site monitoring strategy.

API monitoring is especially crucial for your stores’ mobile apps, which rely on APIs for data delivery and consumption. Without APIs, your mobile app is little more than a slick tactile interface that can’t actually do anything, much less generate revenue. Since many mobile app customers are browsing your site to make future purchases in store or via your desktop site, poor API performance here can cost you not just a mobile app customers, but a lot of future business.

To learn more about APIs and how Catchpoint can help you to monitor API performance and availability as part of your overall digital experience monitoring strategy, visit our API Observability page.