Across Asia Pacific, “Real-Time Retail” and e-commerce have never been more essential to meet the expectations of always-on, connected customers than it is today. To be successful, e-retailers need to ensure high availability and functionality across complex, interconnected services such as payment gateways, inventory and order management, and website and mobile apps.

With competition and consumer expectations higher than ever, e-retailers must ensure they adopt customer-centric, mobile-first approaches to meet rising consumer expectations. A single minute of downtime in just one of those services can decrease employee productivity, negatively impact brand reputation, and result in lost revenue.

In today’s unprecedented environment, where digital-first has become the new normal, consumers across Asia Pacific are now relying on e-retailers for most of their transactions. No longer limited to native digital retail items, these consumers are buying everything from pantry staples and fresh produce, to stationery and home office equipment—in other words, anything they may have bought in a bricks-and-mortar establishment in the past.

At PagerDuty, we recognize that having real-time oversight is particularly critical for e-commerce systems in today’s environment, especially with the majority of the world’s population confined in their homes and doing most of their shopping on online retail sites.

In fact, in reviewing the volume of recent incidents globally across March, PagerDuty’s data shows that businesses across several verticals, including online learning, collaboration services, travel, non-essential retail, and entertainment services, are experiencing up to 11x more incidents than usual. With this unprecedented increase in traffic volumes, IT teams and leadership need to work together to triage and resolve issues as they arise to ensure they are able to serve their customers.

For example, tech teams in the food and grocery sector in Asia Pacific and Japan are experiencing added pressure tied to increased online traffic, which can lead to service disruptions and outages.

In February, PagerDuty also released our APJ 2020 State of Unplanned Work Report, which highlighted trends around increased workloads caused by unplanned outages. Of the more than 500 APJ businesses surveyed, more than 70 percent of respondents first learned of technical issues from their customers, and 85 percent of regional businesses experienced significant technical issues or disruptions that were not covered by the company’s response plan.

At a time when customers are relying on their preferred e-commerce retailers even more to deliver exceptional real-time product and service offerings, businesses need a solution that can help ensure service reliability by providing real-time data surrounding outages and service disruptions.

PagerDuty is here to help. We specialize in helping technical teams identify and orchestrate real-time incident response by providing full visibility into tech stacks so businesses can resolve critical issues when every second matters.

For any e-commerce business that isn’t already using PagerDuty for their real-time digital operations, we are providing a free six-month Starter plan license for up to six users (use the code “COVID-19” to sign up). Larger enterprise businesses can access a 14-day trial. Or click here to contact the PagerDuty Asia Pacific & Japan team.