How can online retailers ensure virtual shopping carts will continue to be filled now that Black Friday has kicked off the seasonal shopping season? New writer Lenore Adam talks about ways to prevent website bottlenecks and guarantee a positive and consistent user experience.
For consumers, it is less of a trend and more of a way of life. Ubiquitous use of smart phones with fast internet has helped blur the lines between what were traditionally distinct retail and online shopping days. Economists estimate that digital shopping will rise by ‘11.7 percent this year, lifting the overall proportion of online sales to 14.7 percent of total retail activity, or $1 out of every $7’ that consumers spend this season. Despite these indicators, major retailers were caught unprepared for the volume of online shopping this year, promoting products that consumers were unable to order due to website overload.
Ensure a Positive User Experience
Even after the holiday rush, online retailers are still vulnerable to unpredictable demand. Will another polar vortex increase climate commerce and drive an unexpected wave of consumers to your site? Will those newly implemented e-commerce delivery options stress back-end systems and reduce peak performance? Are you ready for this season’s variety & volume of access devices, browsers, and geographically dispersed access points? Online retail success demands a positive user experience for a customer base accustomed to web page response times ticked off in milliseconds.
The mantra for brick and mortar retailers is often location, location, location. With online retailers it’s more like test, test, test. This is where Silk Performer and Cloudburst come in. Borland products help prevent our customers – who include some of the biggest names in online retailing – from becoming another online casualty. Archie Roboostoff, Director of Product Management, explains how Silk is used not only for website performance testing, but also for testing responsive web design. For example, use Silk to test…
‘…across different configurations of browsers to outline where things can be tuned…For example, Silk can determine that your application runs 15% slower on Firefox than Chrome on Android. Adjusting the stylesheets or javascript may be all that is required to performance tune your application. Testing for responsive web design is crucial to keeping user experience sentiments high…’
When ‘a 100 millisecond delay… equates to a 1% drop in revenue’, online performance clearly is business critical. With the competition just a click away, don’t lose customers due to poor site performance. Keep them on your site, happily filling up their shopping carts. Try Silk Performer here.
