As manufacturers and distributors do more of their business-to-business sales through e-commerce, they often realize such benefits as acquiring new customers and being able to sell a broader range of products.

But the more they sell digitally, and especially when they offer custom contract pricing for a large number of customers, the more they must guard against interruptions in website performance, several experts said on a panel about site performance today at the B2B Online conference in Chicago.

They advised companies operating online to:

• Ensure they have strong service-level agreements with technology vendors that include penalties if promised service levels are not maintained;
• Identify who among multiple vendors and the client itself is responsible for the performance of all website features and applications;
• Use site performance-monitoring tools to quickly identify site performance problems;
• Consider using a content delivery network that can cache web data and serve it up quickly when needed to properly display content on a website.

Jody Yeganeh, senior director, e-commerce, at industrial products distributor Lawson Products, said the deployment of databases and software applications across a mix of cloud-based and on-premise network servers requires a company to have effective agreements with each of its technology vendors regarding responsibility for site performance. A manufacturer or distributor selling through its own e-commerce site needs to clarify where each technology vendor’s responsibility for site performance begins and ends, she noted.

An e-commerce site, for example, may have one vendor that hosts a cloud-based content management system, another hosting a site search system, and another providing a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system. If a website isn’t displaying the right product descriptions in site search results, for example, the site operator must be able to identify who is responsible: its own I.T. staff, a site search vendor, a content management system vendor or its ERP provider.

Understanding where such responsibilities begin and end among multiple technology providers and a company’s own staff can make the difference between quick or delayed resolution of a site performance issue, Yeganeh said. “It could be the difference between 15 minutes or three days,” she said.

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