Current insights
in E-Commerce
Anomaly detection

You look at the dashboard, the numbers look good, and you rely on your gut feeling – ‘everything's fine’. This is pretty much what everyday life looks like for many e-commerce retailers.

The excitement builds when no one knows exactly what's inside: fashion retailer Goose & Gander stood out in 2021 with a bold mystery box campaign.

Europe's largest fashion retailer, Zalando, shows how modern technology is accelerating e-commerce. There, AI-supported co-pilots are used to automatically suggest product attributes and descriptions.

Your shop system is extremely flexible – but the more interfaces and processes are added, the higher the susceptibility to errors becomes?

In July 2025 alone, ChatGPT was the most downloaded app worldwide with over 52 million downloads – for the fifth month in a row. This puts the AI tool ahead of TikTok and Instagram, which had long topped the charts.

In the summer of 2025, Walmart unveiled a large-scale initiative: with AI “super agents” such as “Sparky” for customers and “Marty” for sales staff, the retail giant aims to automate key tasks – from order management to customer interaction.

Increasing order volumes, shorter delivery times and growing customer expectations: in order to survive in the market, online retailers will have to pull out all the stops in 2025.

To avoid stumbling from one ‘minefield of errors’ to the next, many e-commerce shops are now relying on automation.

A study by EHI shows that 12 per cent of the top 1,000 e-commerce shops in Germany rely on Shopware (versions 5 and 6) – more often than on Magento or other systems.

If e-commerce retailers were to make a horror film, it would probably have this short title: Plugin Update!

Sounds too dramatic? This example shows how far-reaching faulty updates can be: a small system adjustment by IT security provider CrowdStrike paralysed millions of Windows systems worldwide in July 2024.

In September 2024, it happened to the industry giant of all companies: during its big Labor Day Sale, Amazon experienced a massive checkout glitch. Customers were unable to complete their purchases because payments got stuck in the final step.

FIFA fans could hardly believe their eyes: In June 2023, the Ultimate Edition of FIFA 23 was suddenly available in the Epic Games Store in India for less than a dollar – instead of the usual £60.

For end customers, it sounds too good to be true – but so-called ‘returnless refunds’ have actually been common practice for some time now. This allows consumers to keep the goods they have ordered if they are not satisfied. And they don't have to return them.

11 July 2021, London Heathrow.

A man is stopped by the police while checking in. The reason? Facial recognition software has mistaken him for a wanted person.

According to statistics, over 80 percent of all failures in e-commerce go unnoticed for a long time. The reason? Many shops use classic dashboards to monitor their sales figures and processes.

“We are just getting started, but in the short time since we launched these features, we already have (...) 30,000 sellers using these offerings,” explained Dharmesh Mehta, Vice President of the Amazon marketplace in summer 2024.

Business intelligence dashboards have become an essential part of corporate management. They offer figures, charts and KPIs at a glance - but they usually only show what has already happened.

Sales and order data in e-commerce follow certain rhythms: Working days, marketing campaigns, seasonal events and public holidays characterize daily business.

Luck for the customers - and really tough for the affected retailers: In December 2014, a software error in the British repricing tool RepricerExpress caused numerous products on Amazon UK to be mistakenly offered for just one penny.