INTRODUCTION
When I can’t sleep at night (yes, I’m a night owl) and need to do some light reading, or when I’m waiting in line at the supermarket, then I tend to read about marketing. Services like Google Analytics are a good source for free information; however as an ecommerce professional you have to have ready access to the data. I thought it might be a good idea for me to compile a list of free ecommerce monitoring tools that any business owner can use from anywhere.
Online stores are constantly vying for your attention. For ecommerce stores, this means trying to find ways to improve the customer and visitor experience. They try to improve conversion rates and increase sales by using a variety of different technologies. A lot of different tools to monitor visitors are at their disposal. However, not all of them are free. If you are just starting out with ecommerce and have a limited budget, stick around – because I’ve compiled a list of 11 free ecommerce monitoring tools that won’t hurt your pocket!
If you’re selling an item online, chances are you want to know when it sells or what the demand is. Fortunately, there are many free tools available to do just that. In this article, I’ve collected some of the top free tools which you can use to monitor your store and competitors.
As an ecommerce business, maybe you already have a merchant account with a solution such as Shopify or WooCommerce. These all-in-one solutions are great, but what happens when you’re tracking multiple sales channels across different platforms and none of them syncs in real-time? It’s hard to get an accurate picture of your business performance.
There are plenty of useful ecommerce monitoring tools that aren’t perpetually charging you for their services. I’ve used many of them and in this post, I want to share my favorite ones with you.
What is meant by monitoring tools?
Monitoring tools are used to continuously keep track of the status of the system in use, in order to have the earliest warning of failures, defects or problems and to improve them. There are monitoring tools for servers, networks, databases, security, performance, website and internet usage, and applications.
Why do we need monitoring tools?
Monitoring tools ultimately give you the power to relieve your team from menial tasks, save time and money in service operations activities, reduce and even prevent system downtime, and help with your strategy, budgets, and continual improvement plans
Which is the best monitoring tool?
The Top Network Monitoring Tools and Software
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL. …
- Datadog Network Monitoring – FREE TRIAL. …
- ManageEngine OpManager – FREE TRIAL. …
- PRTG Network Monitor from Paessler – FREE TRIAL. …
- Progress WhatsUp Gold – FREE TRIAL. …
- Auvik – FREE TRIAL. …
- Site24x7 Network Monitoring – FREE TRIAL.
7 types of monitoring to get you started
- Process monitoring. This is often referred to as ‘activity monitoring. …
- Compliance monitoring. …
- Context monitoring. …
- Beneficiary monitoring. …
- Financial monitoring. …
- Organisational monitoring. …
- Results monitoring.
The following are a few server monitoring tools in DevOps:
- Prometheus.
- Splunk.
- Nagios.
- Zabbix.
- Sysdig.
- Sematext.
- Sensu
Tools for monitoring your eCommerce store!
When you’re running a shop – whether it be an offline or online one – then you’ll want to be kept appraised of what’s going on, and learn as soon as possible of any weakness or failing in the system.
Let’s examine some of the best tools that online retailers have in this regard.
1. Zabbix
Zabbix is a service which provides a comprehensive menu of monitoring options, and which allows developers to write bespoke scripts to check different aspects of the site.
2. Appdynamics
Appdynamics provides a peerless depth of monitoring into web applications and infrastructure, with deep and detailed reporting. It comes at a price to match, however.
3. Logentries
Longentries differs from applications like Zabbix in that it reports error messages directly from the application reporting them. It’s great for when you need detail for troubleshooting.
4. New Relic
New Relic will monitor how well an application is performing from within the server it’s being hosted on, checking constantly for disk space, CPU usage, response time a request volume. It’ll thereby provide very useful information.
5. Scriptrock/UpGuard
Scriptrock/UpGuard allows you to check for differences between servers which should be identical, and thereby offers excellent protection against unwanted changes (be they made in error or through malice).
6. Updown
This online service periodically checks your website by constantly sending an http head request to a specified URL. When the site stops working, you’ll be notified via email or text. Simple, effective, invaluable.
7. Pingometer
This paid-for service is slightly more complex; it boasts twelve different monitoring stations on continents around the world. It’ll monitor your website’s responsiveness to a wide range of different protocols.
8. StatusOK
StatusOK differs from the competition slightly; it’s an open-source solution which is self-hosted – but if you’re so inclined, you can always set up a VPS to test your site’s responsiveness to traffic from anywhere in the world.
9. Pingdom
Pingdom is among the world’s most popular monitoring tools. It boasts a network comprising more than sixty different monitoring stations, which check your site every minute. Pingdom will not just monitor whether your site is responding, but how quickly – so if something slows it down suddenly, you’ll know about it quickly.
10. Uptrends
Uptrends makes use of even more monitoring stations than Pingdom, with more than a hundred and fifty spread across the globe. While it lacks a free version, the availability of advanced features like waterfall reports will justify the cost for many
You Can Also Try
Query setup
Enter any keyword combination to track your brand name, campaign hashtags, key people, or competitors. Use powerful filters to narrow your search and get relevant results.
- Advanced search using Boolean operators
- Location & language filters
- Source
- Authors
- Influence score
- Sentiment
Mention feed
View results in feed and get various engagement statistics such as mention author, location, number of interactions, engagement & influence rate, reach. Or filter your mentions by date, source, reach, virality, or sentiment.Try it now!
Data visualization & analysis
Choose from predefined chart dashboards or create your own to get the most out of your collected mention data.
- Reach & impressions
- Source breakdown
- Influencer dashboards
- Share of voice
- Sentiment analysis
- Word cloud
- Competitive analysis
Get even more from media monitoring with our customer-favourite features:
Alerts &
Digests
Get notifications about new mentions and spikes in mentions via email, Slack, or on your Mediatoolkit mobile app. Create a custom schedule or choose a daily, weekly, or monthly option.
Custom & Branded reports
Create your own charts using over 2000 different chart combinations. Download the report and customize it to fit your brand visual identity (add your own logo, color scheme, title, & more)*.
*Branded reports are only available with our Optimal and Enterprise plans.
Unlimited number of users
Invite as many colleagues as you want to your organization and assign different roles, from Admin and Edit to Analyze and View.
User-friendly
feed
You have full control over your feed. Choose from various filtering options and easily navigate through your mentions.
Automated Actions
Automate the process of assigning tags and sentiment to your mentions. Rather than browsing through your mentions and manually adding a tag and/or changing the sentiment, the tool automatically does it for you.
Numerous data export options
Download or export your data reports in a matter of seconds. You can choose between various formats: Mentions in email, Excel, Powerpoint, Word, PDF, and Report PDF.
Real-time customer support
We’re there for you every step of the way and we respond as soon as possible:
- Email support
- Chat support (response time under 5 minutes)
- Phone support
- Setup assistance
- Customer Success consulting service
CONCLUSION
Online stores including Amazon and eBay earn billions of dollars every year. While this may make selling on these platforms an enticing prospect, there is a cost to selling on any platform. The cost isn’t merely monetary — if your store goes down, you lose sales and your reputation. For example, if your shop is the number one search result for a term, you will receive thousands of visitors per day. But if it’s down due to technical problems or poor SEO, you’ll lose sales. In this article I’ve rounded up free ecommerce monitoring tools that will allow you to monitor all of your online stores in one place, and in real time.
Are you choosing ecommerce monitoring tools that are right for your store? When someone is setting up an online business they may not realize how much they need to know about their site and how it’s doing. They won’t realize the importance of choosing a good team of developers and an ecommerce monitoring tool that runs smoothly.
We all think that our ecommerce store will be a success. Until we’re not really successful. And then we realize that if we had more data, we could figure out what to do to improve the numbers and thus, become successful. This is where free monitoring tools would come in handy.