Managing the Mobile Surge, and Key Insights From Black Friday 2014
Nothing reveals strengths and weaknesses of a website or app better than peak demand events. It's a story as old as the internet: a site operates fine under normal pressures but cracks under the strain of peak events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The 2014 holiday kickoff events produced a unique set of challenges, leaving the e-commerce industry with a number of lessons to ponder and learn from.
Dynatrace monitored top retailers throughout "gray weekend" and came away not only with detailed information on which brands cashed in and which missed out, but a clear picture of why and how others can learn from what happened. There was a stark contrast between winners and losers, of course, and it delivered one simple message: the losers weren't prepared for the unprecedented mobile surge. Since hindsight is 20/20, I want to be sure that all readers reap the benefits of seeing exactly how today's omnichannel retail landscape and the ubiquity of mobile shopping have changed the game, and what they need to do to keep winning.
Dynatrace released its 2014 Mobile Holiday Shopping Survey in mid-November, predicting more consumers would use mobile devices this holiday season than ever. However, some retailers weren't ready for the influx of mobile traffic heading into the weekend, and found themselves at sea when it came to dealing with this mobile tsunami. Take a look at charts one and two below, detailing the top 10 and bottom 10 performing mobile sites. A response time of three seconds or less is a must to keep mobile customers happy.
Indeed, Dynatrace data shows 37 percent of mobile users will abandon an app and shop elsewhere if it takes more than three seconds to load. Yet the bottom 10 retailers were only able to muster an average response time of 12.35 seconds. This begs the questions: How did they fail so badly? Sadly, the answer is simple: they didn't adjust for mobile.
Many of the worst mobile performers likely had perfectly decent websites, but they made the mistake of trying to push the same amount of content out via mobile as they did for their desktop site. This is an easy mistake for a beginner to make. Top performers design their mobile sites to be responsive, and alter the amount of content delivered based on the device being used to access it. Those retailers that didn't do this saw their mobile sites bending, if not breaking altogether, while they tried to deliver more content than they realistically could effectively across mobile.
In the end, when preparing for peak web events, it's often more useful to think about what your site or app doesn't need rather than what it does. Less is often more in the realm of mobile performance. Trying to deliver the same quantity of content via mobile will almost certainly have a negative effect on the quality of the experience your valuable end user will have. Many e-tailers pack their website full of features to urge prospects to buy more, but these features prove useless if the site won't load efficiently and correctly with total reliability.
Therefore, while many still feel that "content is king," it takes a back seat to performance, especially during peak events. All the content in the world isn't going to influence users if they've all gone to another app because of a poor experience. Take into account all the variables, and thoroughly test your site to handle them in all channels. This way, no matter which approach your end users take, you'll be ready to perform when it matters most.
David Jones is the field technical evangelist director for Dynatrace, a provider of application performance management tools.
