customer story

Blue Nile

Achieving Seamless End-User Experience

As the world’s largest online retailer of fine jewelry and diamonds, Blue Nile knows that buying fine jewelry is a big - and often expensive - decision.  Supporting their customers through the decision-making process is vital, and online performance is crucial to building a great customer experience.

Blue Nile uses Catchpoint to:

  • Proactively find and resolve website performance issues.
  • Track third-party tags.
  • Conduct regional market performance analytics.
  • Streamline cross-vendor integration.
Employees:
200-1,000 employees
Revenue:
$288.7 Million
Headquarters:
Seattle, WA
Industry:
eCommerce

If you really want to go to bed at night and not worry about your website, you’ll consider Catchpoint.

Robin Schenck
,
QA and Release Manager

Problem

This is a summary of an interview with Robin Schenck, QA and release manager, Blue Nile. It has been edited for clarity.

My name is Robin Schenck. I’m the QA and release manager at Blue Nile.  I am involved in day-to-day operations and making sure our website is performing 100 percent for all our customers around the world.  Active observability gives us a baseline measurement view of how well our site is performing, which is vital to an online retailer.

Our past vendors struggled to capture the data we needed in a meaningful way, which made it hard to actually find and identify problems. When we found Catchpoint, it felt like all our problems were solved.

Solution

We chose Catchpoint to partner with because we really needed to be able to find the real technical data that’s part of every request.  Catchpoint provides us with a lot of really cool tools that we rely on daily.

For instance, I use their zones and hosts feature all the time. It allows us to keep track of the third-party tags that load through Google's tag manager.  This is valuable information for us as well as internal teams like Marketing, so we need to closely monitor how well those tags are performing for our customers. You don’t want them to impact the shopping experience.

We've also found that Catchpoint works well right out of the box. There are easy integrations ready to go for Splunk and PagerDuty, and on top of that we can easily integrate Catchpoint’s agents with our own Bamboo setup. If we saw a slow measurement somewhere in Catchpoint, we could go back and tie that to a particular request, and then start researching it in Splunk.

Results

A lot of our business groups are now starting to gain interest in the data that Catchpoint captures for us. Through their agents, we’re able to pull really valuable performance data for markets that we previously didn't have great information for, particularly in China, Asia Pacific, and some markets in Europe.

Catchpoint is also vital to Black Friday operations, which kick off the most important time of the year for our company. We want to make sure our sites can handle the load while still performing flawlessly for all our customers. We really rely on Catchpoint’s Black Friday Assurance Program to help keep an eye on things for us when we’re not able to.

We’re going to be looking at some important key performance indicators for tracking how well we’re doing over the holiday season. Some obvious ones like, "How many people are adding to their cart?" or "How many people are going through the cart?" Then on top of that, we’re also curious about, "How many people are visiting from different places around the world?"

If you really want to go to bed at night and not worry about your website, you’ll consider Catchpoint.