Over the past 10 years, e-Commerce has been one of the fastest growing online segments. Today there are hundreds of thousands of online stores, with merchants opening some 20,000 new e-Commerce storefronts every week, according to industry estimates. This astounding growth is not all that surprising, as many businesses view opening an e-Commerce storefront as a way to enhance their revenue streams.
However, e-Commerce is not always a silver bullet. According to one leading Internet marketing firm, a whopping 97% of businesses fail to succeed online and ultimately end up going out of business within the first three years of operation. On the bright side, the remaining 3% of businesses often succeed in doubling or tripling their profits as a result of e-Commerce.
Ultimately, the success (or lack thereof) of an e-Commerce business hinges on two key abilities: attracting customers and completing sales. Many businesses focus so much on the first part of the equation via search engine optimization, that they don’t pay enough attention to the latter part: the actual execution of sales. But the fact is application performance and usability are just as important as page rank in determining e-Commerce success.
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Five Steps to Improving E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales
Following are five suggestions for improving e-Commerce site performance for increased sales. Each of these suggestions depends on having a true understanding of the customer experience with a web site or web application.
Avoid Unnecessary Network Load: Although broadband connections are now considered a commodity and many Internet users can stream videos online, it is still important to keep the size and download time of a web site in check. Nothing influences a customer’s perception of a web site’s user-friendliness more than speed. It can therefore be very helpful to weigh the time it takes for an operation to occur, from the true customer perspective, against the number of hits. A business may find that an online video is adding significantly to overall web site load time, even though few customers are actually using it in the conversion process. By gaining better insight into the real customer interaction, many businesses discover they are pushing out heavy content unnecessarily.
Next, it’s important to ensure a site is properly cached. If a web browser needs to download the same content over and over, even if the page is not too heavy, the “round trips” involved can result in slower page downloads. Content delivery networks (CDNs) can be extremely useful in speeding the delivery of web site content. But when relying on services from any external third-party, it’s important to remember that “you’re only as strong as your weakest link.” If a CDN slows down under heavy aggregate traffic, each of its individual business customers is apt to slow down too. Monitoring from the true customer perspective is the only way to understand if a CDN, or any third-party service, is delivering consistently strong performance.
Improve Back-End Performance: In addition to network-related problems, the increasing complexity and multiple tiers of modern data centers make it much more difficult to pinpoint sources of problems in the back-end (i.e. slow database calls). The key to weeding out these problems proactively and quickly is tracing all transactions, 24×7, from the customer’s browser back across the multiple tiers of the data center, even all the way back to the mainframe.
Many e-Commerce businesses have seen huge end-user performance improvements resulting from very slight tweaks made at the back-end. Monitoring all transactions, all the time, is the key to finding and fixing these problems expeditiously, before customers report them. It is also the key to distinguishing rare, individual performance aberrations — which may not merit much attention — from widespread trends impacting big groups of customers.
Understand Your Clients: A common challenge e-Commerce businesses face is delivering superb user experiences across all popular browsers. Ensuring that a web site will look and work flawlessly on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer can be a lot of effort. Not to mention businesses now need to take into account an extremely wide range of mobile browsers and devices.
For these reasons, it is important to understand one’s customer demographic, which may or may not reflect general demographics. Modern performance monitoring tools can now recognize the nature of inbound traffic, making it easier to determine which customer segments are most prevalent and should be prioritized (i.e. Internet Explorer users). In addition, by tracing all transactions, an e-business can see which user segments are buying the most or least, as well as which are abandoning. This helps to focus performance optimization efforts.
Understand When The Conversion Path May Be Too Long Or Cumbersome: Annoyances, whether caused by poor application performance or bad design, can be very disruptive to an online business. E-Commerce businesses should not threaten customer loyalty with an aggressive push for registration requirements. When presented with a long registration form, many customers terminate their site visits by closing the registration page even while it is still loading. Unless a customer can quickly complete their purchases through a simple checkout process, an e-Commerce site may lose the sale and turn the customer away from future visits.
Once again, businesses can benefit from a true view into the conversion funnel, paying particular attention to shopping carts, check-outs, registrations and other critical junctures where abandonments often occur. Not only does this help identify performance problems with third-party services contributing to applications, but it also reveals areas of frequent abandonment that aren’t necessarily performance-related.
Ensure Scalability Of An E-Commerce Site: When all the pieces of creating a successful e-Commerce application finally harmonize, it must be ready to take the load. Otherwise, businesses often become victims of their own success. Provided that an e-Commerce presence is well built, there should be no problems with steady growth of customers visiting a site.
Many businesses use load testing to ensure their sites can handle peak traffic. But in many cases, these load testing approaches rely on synthetic traffic generated from within one’s own data center. This does not reflect the application experience at the actual browser, which is subject to a wide range of performance-impacting variables outside the firewall — i.e. third-party services, the cloud, ISPs and other network elements. Load testing from the true customer perspective is the only way to identify weaknesses across this complete application delivery chain and fix what is possible.
Setting up an e-Commerce business may be a great idea from the outside. But many businesses find that sales do not increase after the implementation of an e-Commerce platform. What’s worse, businesses are often losing money, by investing heavily in e-Commerce platforms that do not pay off and driving away would-be customers.
Amazon provides a stark example of the real cost of poor performance. In late summer, Amazon’s North American retail site went down for about 49 minutes, with visitors greeted with the word “Oops.” One estimate by Forbes put the cost to Amazon at nearly $2 million in sales. While most e-businesses are nowhere near the size of Amazon, this figure provides a sense of the magnitude of potential loss.
When it comes to building a successful e-Commerce business, “loud marketing” is just one piece of the puzzle. Businesses must pay equal attention to not just getting more customers to their sites, but inciting them to increase transactions. This requires a focus beyond just search engine optimization, to application performance and usability.
Klaus Enzenhofer is a Technology Strategist for Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) Business Unit. He can be reached at [email protected].
