ECommerce systems suffer from the same seasonal sales stress that brick-and-mortar stores do. Large numbers of people seeking small numbers of products, all pushing to grab items, stow them in a shopping cart and get to the checkout, all as fast as possible. And just like an in-store experience, people become frustrated and abandon their cart if the item they want is not available, the sales process is confusing or uncoordinated, or if the payment is difficult to achieve or the store doesn’t accept that type of payment.
It is stressful, and just because it takes place online, doesn’t make it less stressful for many shoppers who find that at times of high volume sales, they are unable to process orders and payments simply because your website is ‘full’ or overburdened by traffic. Customers will turn away, and sales will be lost.
To understand what times delays are acceptable by online shoppers you need to understand what elements of your website will slow the process and at what points customers will tolerate delays.
- network transmission time
- processing time of the request by the servers
- time of displaying the results by the user’s device
Depending on your eCommerce site, the geographical dispersion of shoppers, and the devices customers are using, each of these elements will have a different impact on Customer Experience.
One of the biggest issues with loading times is optimized images. For many eRetailers, this is an essential element of the online store, so solutions must be found, for others, images are less important and delays could be resolved easily just by understanding your market needs. The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is also important and needs to be understood to ensure that the simplest and shortest route is taken to display images and pages as traffic lands on pages.
How efficient is your system?
ECommerce platforms that operate on standardized SaaS can contact their platform provider for information about CDN and graphics, but with each plug-in used to create a more unique experience, the assessment becomes more complicated. While conducting a performance test can give some answers to where in the system things are slowing, this costs time and money that many startups do not have to spend.
So before commissioning performance tests, knowing what question to ask will help you to narrow in on the issue, saving you investigation costs. Here are some examples of issues that should be reviewed:
- How many users is the platform able to serve simultaneously?
- How many transactions can be executed per unit of time?
- What is the maximum momentary load (audience, number of transactions) the system can withstand?
- What determines the operation speed of the end user’s shop?
- Does the shop have features that are unusual or unnecessary, such as complex product catalog structure, strong customer segmentation, and recommendations, a large number of products, etc.?
- Can the plug-ins integrated with the website handle the expected number of customers, orders, inventory variations, etc.?
System tests that focus on key questions that you have already identified as potential issues will save you time and money as you begin performance testing. If you are already aware that a plug-in might be the cause of concern, you can test just that plug-in and its efficacy on your site. This can often be done by researching the history and comparing reports. Often this will show you the weakness faster than a performance test.
Can you predict the future?
Accessing publicly available data that relates to your eCommerce industry will give you insights into the future of your business. For example, toy retailers will most certainly show an increase in sales prior to the Christmas holiday period in many regions worldwide. This would then indicate that as a toy retailer you need to be prepared for the peak sales periods that your competition has already identified. To gather this systematic data you can:
- access user behavior on Google Analytics,
- assess individual components of your website (application servers, databases, search engines, caches, etc.)
- observe changes in the application (new functions, integrations, functional conversions, etc.)
Internal tests indicate whether you have responded to the need for speed on your website or if you need to investigate further changes. Absolute values of indicators such as percentage load of processors, number of running processes, or disk operations in time allows an experienced engineer to assess the health of the system, and even more accurate diagnoses can be made when comparative material is collected. For this reason, the longer history gives better data and indicators that support investigations. Many analysts are able to assess this data and determine even without further investigation that your system can cope with loads based on spike rates and other comparative factors. Usually, with some small tweaks, systems can be prepared to handle an influx for a particular season, and you are able to increase your load capacity for even a short period of time to satisfy that peak demand, then defer to lesser settings for your normal trade, reducing overall costs.
Communication
Good communication between your merchandisers, marketers and website developers is essential to the overall success of your website at peak load periods. The departments need to coordinate and discuss dates and the scale of planned promotions, their effects on the site, visible bottlenecks, and expected limitations of the system. When these things are made clear it is often easier to resolve potential issues before they happen than scramble as your website crashed on sale day. If you have systems in place to respond to an increase in traffic for an event, you are not only more likely to have thought about solutions first, you are also more likely to have people monitoring the website for any faults or glitches so that operations are kept as smooth as possible.
Preparing your eCommerce site for seasonal sales is a way to ensure that not only do you reap the best benefit on the day, you also solidify your reputation as a reliable online store.
