Gomez

As the summer winds down, students head back to school and there's a predictable upward trend in e-commerce activity in a number of categories. Scholars and their families are flocking to university websites to select courses, register and make tuition payments, and they're heading in droves to retailers like Ikea, Best Buy and Target to buy important supplies, furniture, electronics, clothing and more for the coming academic year. The National Retail Federation's 2014 Back-to-School Survey predicts the average family with children in grades K-12 will spend $669.28 on apparel, shoes, supplies and electronics this back-to-school season, up 5 percent from 2013.

Gomez's second annual Best of the Web awards for the best performing web and mobile sites provide a benchmark for performance across six industries and highlight the leaders who provide superior web and mobile site experiences that enhance customer loyalty, reduce costs and increase revenue.

Website and mobile site experiences that are fast, reliable and consistent can play a huge role in driving online conversions and revenues, particularly during heavy sales periods like the holidays.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

Heavy traffic volumes brought on by peak sales periods can put even the most battle-tested websites and applications to the test. To make matters worse, missteps almost always seem to happen at times when businesses have the most to gain — or lose.

The mobile Web can augment the in-store shopping experience as many consumers check and compare competitors’ products and prices as they actually peruse store aisles and contemplate purchases. This was a key finding in Compuware Gomez Mobile Benchmark Review of May 2010.

This is the era of the “web application delivery chain,” and poor performance at any step can trip up your shoppers’ experiences and potentially push them to a competitor’s site and mailing list. The harsh reality is that shoppers don’t care about what’s causing your poor performance, whether it’s a network provider bottleneck, a third-party content problem or a meddlesome browser glitch. They'll simply lay the blame squarely at your door. Like it or not, retailers are responsible for managing the performance of all the elements comprising the web application delivery chain.

According to a report by the Aberdeen Group entitled “The Performance of Web Applications — Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second,” one second delays in response time significantly impact top business goals.

One second delays can reduce:

• page views by 11%
• conversions by 7%
• customer satisfaction by 16%
Aberdeen Analyst Bojan Simic and Gomez CTO Imad Mouline discuss:
• Top strategic actions companies are taking to advance web application performance.
• Best practices for ensuring your most important web pages and transactions perform properly.

Ensuring great experiences for today’s rich and complex web applications requires a new approach to performance testing. Application owners, e-business and marketing managers, QA & IT operations all need to ensure mission & business critical transactions perform flawlessly.

Coolibar, an e-retailer that sells items such as sunscreen and sun-protective swimwear, used a service to help it see how customers were navigating and experiencing its retail site. It quickly realized it needed to speed up its site response time. Read More...