5 Tips to Unlocking Holiday E-Commerce Success
As the online retail marketplace continues to get more competitive every year, delivering superior online experiences that drive conversions should be the top priority for online retailers. Regardless of how much inventory or bells and whistles a retailer's websites offers, conversions and loyalty depend on performance.
So what do e-retailers need to do as they gear up for the most important season of the year? Here are five tips:
1. Hone your focus on application performance. If you don't have a solid application performance management (APM) strategy in place, you need to act fast. When application performance isn't adequately pre-planned, performance problems can occur. Applications need to be load tested ahead of time to make sure they can withstand high traffic and heavy use, otherwise users will be disappointed and businesses impacted.
In today's crowded online marketplace, competitors are three millimeters and a click away from sales that could be yours … if your site performs. According to 2013 holiday research from Harris Interactive, it takes seconds for consumers to give up on a site and head elsewhere with dollars, loyalty and opinions to share on social media. So don't get caught off guard; focus on application performance now!
2. Keep your eyes on end users. If you're serious about success, you need an APM solution that provides visibility from every perspective as it relates to end users. To manage performance, especially as complexity increases, you need insight into all transactions at all times. Sampling won't cut it. You can use this insight to ensure your websites and apps are performing for users regardless of their devices, browsers or operating systems.
3. Simplify. You need an APM approach that shares a unified perspective with all stakeholders, from development to testing to QA to production. To simplify application performance, get a shared perspective on where challenges stem from.
We looked at a major online retailer that optimized its site for minimal trips to download content. Its performance was over 50 percent better than competitors which packed in lots of fancy features. Keep things simple rather than include every option under the sun and then disappoint with a sluggish experience.
4. Don't miss the boat on mobility. Mobile shopping is ubiquitous, but consumers still demand performance. In the Harris survey, 37 percent of smartphone and tablet users said they would shop elsewhere if a company's mobile site fails to load within three seconds. This means that companies who want to capitalize on holiday rush periods need to be sure the end-user experience they deliver on tablets and smartphones meets or even exceeds the level of excellence users have come to expect from traditional PC browsers.
Consumers will shop with their devices wherever they find the best experience (and deals). Last year, most companies failed to deliver the mobile experience consumers wanted. Response times averaged over 18 seconds to complete a multistep transaction, which led to increased abandonment and bounce rates as well as revenue loss. Your mobile app strategy must match your shopper's level of urgency and expectations for performance. If it doesn't, it's akin to handing wads of cash to your competitors.
5. Open your eyes to performance blind spots. A full application lifecycle approach is key to eliminating blind spots that wreck performance. You need synthetic load testing and monitoring, with real-time, 24/7 tracking of user activity and performance to understand how changing activity and unanticipated pressures are experienced by every end user.
Now that you've got your apps in top shape, don't let a third-party provider cause your customer frustration. Be attuned to increasing reliance on external services in e-commerce website environments. Don't forget, advertising and web analytics, for example, can introduce performance problems too.
The Bottom Line
Think carefully about what's essential to profitability. You might have great deals on your sites and apps, but if users aren't satisfied with the experience they have, you will lose revenue. Seconds matter and performance is the key ingredient to winning customers, brand loyalty and revenue.
If you don't have one, put an APM solution in place now to be sure you've got all the 2014 holiday bases covered.
Klaus Enzenhofer is a technology strategist at Compuware APM, a technology performance company that provides application performance management.