5 Steps to Maximizing Online Revenues This Holiday Season
Temperatures are soaring and traditional retail sales may be softening as shoppers focus on vacations, but for online retailers, summer is one of the busiest times of the year. As smart retailers plan for holiday promotions and purchases, they're also pushing the parameters of website performance so they can speed record numbers of holiday transactions into their business.
It's no secret that holiday sales account for the vast majority of retailers’ annual revenue. Cyber Monday alone accounted for $2.29 billion in sales last year, and that number is expected to grow annually as more shoppers use their digital devices. Yet too many retailers, especially small or midsize companies, neglect taking the essential technology steps that will ensure a thriving and robust holiday season. Instead of planning ahead and preparing their websites to scale with the holidays’ cyber crowds, some retailers try to make do with what they already have in place. This means their most valuable and lucrative customers could experience a poorly performing website, payment delays, and even lost orders or failed purchases.
One cautionary tale is one of our clients that owns and operates official online stores for popular video games. Prior to working with Lagrange Systems, it ran a promotion that spiked traffic, causing a 24-hour application outage on Black Friday 2012. This one error resulted in significant lost revenue. However, the error led to a much better solution as evidenced by its 2013 successes noted below. With so much riding on holiday sales, can your online business risk a similar event?
The following steps can help online retailers maximize revenue this holiday season:
1. Review your online sales and website traffic from last year's holiday season. By evaluating previous traffic, you can make educated projections on how much to scale this season, especially for Cyber Monday traffic spikes. Be sure to consider last year's marketing promotions and this year's plans to further increase website traffic and transactions.
2. Review fumbles from last year and parameters for the "fixes" to put in place. Were there payment hiccups or other issues that sucked valuable resources away from selling products and fulfilling orders? Are there scale limitations with any of the solutions used to fix the problems? Analyzing order forms or customer service notes is a great way to identify pain points that may have hindered a consistent customer experience.
3. Security is a bigger issue than ever due to credit card hackers and viruses like Heartbleed. These breaches can send even the biggest retailers into a tailspin. Take the time to double-check your security for payment processing, and ensure you've made all the right updates to your software.
4. Now that you've reviewed last year's results and shored up security, look at how you can improve your website's performance. Measure your current performance and establish a plan to make it faster. Studies show that a one-second delay in a page load can result in 7 percent lower conversions, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and 11 percent fewer page views. Optimize your site to improve your website's speed.
5. Establish a timeline for testing to ensure your site is ready. The best adjustments allow for continuous and seamless scaling to meet high- and low-traffic demands with no trade-off in website performance. Consider the following example:
- By July 1, agree on projected traffic volumes and a load testing plan.
- By Aug. 1, perform load testing in a secure environment (not live traffic). Follow with a plan for adjustments based on test results.
- Complete any necessary changes to your infrastructure and testing by Sept. 15.
With these tips in mind, your e-commerce site will be ready for even the most impatient shoppers. Here's proof: Remember our earlier cautionary tale about one of our retail clients? By taking smart, proactive steps like those mentioned here, and implementing a truly scalable solution for traffic spikes and maximum performance, it saw a three-time increase in page visits per day, two-time increase in revenue and 100 percent uptime.
Now there's a holiday success story!
Jay Smith is the chief technical officer for Lagrange Systems, a provider of cloud-based web and application performance software.