Tis the season. The season for pointing your mouse over that little yellow icon and clicking “Add to Cart.” According to many sources, 2019 will break all records for online shopping during the holiday season. And that’s being done during the shortest possible time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It’s being reported that U.S. shoppers spent over 126 billion dollars on e-commerce buying this season. Everything from homemade fudge to four wheel drive SUVs. The Saturday before Christmas was the busiest in U.S. history.

Amazon Prime added five million new subscribers in a single week this season. It seems more people than ever were sitting in their recliner with a laptop on their – well – lap, pointing and clicking their way to a happy holiday. This information does, however, beg the question: Why the heck were the lines in WalMart still out the door? Twenty minutes to shop, forty-five minutes to check out.

We also wonder, with all the extra business, how smaller online retailers made out with their Internet connections. More volume means more stress on Internet speed, latency and throughput. It also adds to the possibility of outages.

There’s a company in Washington that sells the best fudge we’ve ever tasted. They take orders over the Internet and will ship their delicious fudge from their shop in the Great NorthWest to anywhere in the U.S. They use PayPal for their payment service and UPS for shipping. We hope they benefited from the record-breaking online gift buying. And we hope they had a network performance monitoring system in place which allowed them to be prepared for the busy buying season.

JitterWorks has a 2020 vision. To help small to medium size businesses like the fudge shop in Washington be prepared for the online shopping revolution. To give them the tools they need to monitor their network performance with a simple, easy to use, intuitive platform that doesn’t require a team of IT specialists.

SMBs need to concentrate on the business at hand. The bottom line. The next sale. They don’t need to spend valuable resources on LOTUs (see our first blog, July 22, 2019 for more information on LOTUs). 

We’re hopeful that 2020 will bring our company record-breaking success. This can be achieved by bringing your company the peace of mind that comes with knowing exactly how your network is performing. And in the process, free you up to make 2020 a year where you see your company achieve record-breaking success.

Happy New Year to all our loyal readers. We appreciate you coming back to look in on us. We hope you enjoy our blogs and maybe learn a thing or two about network performance monitoring.