SPONSORED SUPPLEMENT:Site performance managing a multi-faceted challenge

How fast a retail web site responds today depends on outside service providers and the consumer’s browser, as well as on the performance of the retailer’s data center. Performance experts can provide crucial support for this complex undertaking.

Retailer web sites are more complex than ever. They often rely on outside companies to provide such applications and content as shopping carts, video and customer reviews, and on the consumer’s web browser to assemble the content and render it properly. At the same time, e-commerce sites must mesh flawlessly with back-end technologies, such as inventory and order management systems. Making all those parts come together in a few seconds is no small challenge.

Retailers depend on their online presence to convert visitors to shoppers and ultimately into repeat customers. Site performance plays a key role in creating a unique brand presence for the retailer and building customer loyalty and a sense of community among site visitors.

“Every online retailer wants to deliver a great customer experience and that starts with site availability and site performance,” says Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer for AlertSite, provider of web performance management solutions. “Site performance is all about how fast pages load, how long it takes to transition from one part of the store to another, and how well the various functions of the site are performing.”

While the content on a retail site may come from several sources—including e-commerce vendors, web analytics and product reviews providers, and other third parties—it is the retailer’s responsibility to make sure key store functionality is working well for consumers at all times. This includes landing pages, home page, search functionality, shopping cart, authentication and checkout. If any of these elements perform poorly, it is the retailer’s brand consumers will remember, not the third-party provider of those services.

“The performance and success of all the elements that make up a retailer’s site is critical to business success,” says Godskind. “The shopping experience a retailer provides on their site influences their brand reputation. If the performance of the site is not satisfying to the customer it can impact more than sales.”

First impressions

The consumer starts forming an opinion of the online retailer with the very first page viewed, which is often a landing page linked to pay-per-click advertising, organic search results or an e-mail marketing campaign. How well that page performs is critical.

“Landing pages are a key first impression for customers, and if the speed at which they load disappoints the customer, the marketing dollars spent to bring customers to them are wasted,” says Godskind. “Page downloads, speed of checkout, logging into an account, these are all elements of the site that must be monitored closely.”

While good site performance requires that a retailer’s own data center do its job properly, that no longer guarantees that the retailer’s site is showing up as intended on the consumer’s PC screen. The only way to really know what the consumer is seeing is to look at a retail site from the viewpoint of the customer and the technology the shopper is using to access the site.

“Retailers need to make sure their web site is fully compatible with the browsers customers use, that the size and resolution of the customer’s screen can support the graphical elements of their site, and that shoppers logging in from great geographic distances from the server hosting the site receive the same level of performance as those customers that are closer in,” says Imad Mouline, chief technology officer of performance strategies for web application management firm Gomez Inc. “All of these variables impact performance, and retailers need to take them into consideration when setting the bar on performance.”

Still, there is more to ensuring that a web site is performing at an optimal level than monitoring the applications running on the site, their compatibility with consumer PCs and the back-end servers that deliver those applications. What really counts is how consumers perceive a site to be performing, and the simplest way to gather that information is to ask them.

“Gathering consumer opinions about site performance is important because looking at performance strictly from an I.T. perspective is not going to tell retailers what consumers expect as far as performance,” says Brad Hokamp, senior vice president, Hosting Business Unit, for Savvis Inc., a provider of outsourced managed computing and network infrastructure.

Among the ways retailers can gather customer opinions about performance is to host blogs and chat rooms where customers can express their opinions about a site.

“One of the most effective ways to know consumer thresholds for poor performance is to get direct feedback through social networking forums, such as blogs,” Hokamp says. “Retailers can track customer behavior patterns to pinpoint where on the site customers abandon the shopping session, but that does not provide as full a picture of what customers expect from a performance standpoint as consumer feedback.”

It’s a wide, wide web

What’s more, retailers must recognize that site performance is a moving target, and that consumer expectations are set by all the web sites they visit, including entertainment, news and sports sites that live or die by providing fast response and a great user experience.

“If a customer frequents a site that has faster page downloads, even if it is not a retail site, it influences their expectations of site performance,” says Mouline of Gomez. “Taking the customer’s perspective of site performance means going beyond demographic information and digging deeper to understand what influences where and how consumers set the bar on site performance.”

Once retailers understand their customer’s expectations of site performance, they can begin to prioritize performance metrics. Establishing minimum performance standards for page downloads, for landing page response times and the speed with which site search results are returned are good starting points.

Recent research shows that many consumers begin to get impatient when they have to wait more than two seconds for a page to download, while a similar survey showed they were willing to wait four seconds in 2006, just three years ago. That shows how quickly expectations are changing. Retailers that can’t perform to the level consumers expect today are likely to find many online shoppers quickly leaving their sites without making a purchase.

“The minimum standards for page downloads are shrinking, so meeting those expectations on the front end are a critical part of getting shoppers to commit to a purchase,” says AlertSite’s Godskind. “It’s not enough to set minimum performance standards, retailers have to understand what it means to their business.”

That means understanding how many shoppers are affected by each problem that exists on an e-commerce site. “Most retailers can’t address every site error as it occurs, so they have to prioritize how they fix errors based on the impact to the customer and their business,” says Mouline.

For example, if real-time performance monitoring shows only a few shoppers are experiencing a site error, or that the issue does not negatively impact conversion or lead to site abandonment, the retailer may want to address a more pressing performance issue.

“Understanding the tolerance level of their customers for certain types of errors can help retailers prioritize how they address performance issues,” adds Mouline. “Real-time monitoring helps retailers make these determinations by seeing how each error impacts their business.”

Certain performance issues are common across the web, and tolerated by many consumers. For instance, a video download may take longer than the customer might like, but, so long as the video plays within an acceptable timeframe, the retailer can take steps to reduce the risk of the customer becoming impatient.

“Showing a descriptive progress message as opposed to a blank white-screen indicates the process is working and can help shoppers in the checkout process be more tolerant of the wait,” says Godskind. “A customer’s tolerance level for performance often depends on where they are in the process. Search and product catalogs need to be snappy while log-in and checkout can take a little longer.”

The customer’s view

Delivering consistently excellent site performance requires an online retailer to understand how its site behaves under varying loads, both in terms of volume of visitors and shopper activity.

Pretesting programming code for new content under simulated loads can identify performance errors before the new content goes live on the site. Once the errors are identified, retailers and their third-party content providers can rewrite the code to eliminate the error.

“There can be up to 1,000 content changes a month for the largest retailers, so pretesting the programming code for those changes is a critical first step in the preproduction phase,” says Hokamp of Savvis. “Retailers want to make sure that they maintain performance levels when new content is loaded onto the site.”

Programming code also needs to be regularly tested once it goes live on the web site. “Testing of code is a lifecycle process,” says Hokamp. “Retail sites today are relying more and more on content from third parties, so they need to have disciplined preproduction, production and postproduction testing schedules.”

Testing is just one method to understand how a site performs under varying loads. Retailers also can gain insights into performance by recording each customer’s shopping session and reviewing it.

AlertSite’s Déjà Click is an advanced, yet easy-to-use browser plug-in for defining and measuring the customer’s site experience. This allows retailers to gather a detailed picture of how their servers, and those of their outsourcing partners, perform under varying loads. It also gives retailers a customer’s view of any performance issues that arise and how they affect the shopping experience.

“DéjàClick’s completely built-into-the-browser technology captures performance metrics for how content is delivered so retailers can quickly identify performance culprits,” says Godskind.

To understand how a consumer is likely to view the performance of a particular feature, such as video or site search, retailers must benchmark their performance with other sites. That includes sites of direct competitors and other noncompeting web sites, keeping in mind that it’s the consumer experience across the Internet that sets expectations. Armed with benchmark data from a range of web sites, a retailer can compare the performance of its own site to understand how it measures up to consumer expectations.

“The better retailers understand how the performance of their site compares to the performance of sites that set customer’s expectations for performance, the better prepared they will be to take steps to bring their sites on par or raise the performance bar,” says Mouline.

Gomez provides services to more than 2,500 customers that test web sites in development and measures and benchmarks them when live, employing a software-as-a-service model that lets client retailers plug into Gomez services via the Internet. Web site and web application performance, as well as the customer’s actual web experience, can be measured from design and development through deployment and production.

As the web continues to account for a larger portion of retail sales, retailers more than ever need on-demand scalability to accommodate peak loads, whether those peaks occur during the holidays or as a result of a marketing campaign or sale.

Cloud computing, which is essentially the delivery of server capacity from an outsourcing partner, is gaining popularity because it can provide retailers with the added capacity they need when they need it. That allows merchants to grow their businesses without the upfront costs associated with building or adding to a data center.

What differentiates cloud computing from a traditional outsourcing model is that capacity is elastic, meaning a retailer can scale capacity up or down in real time as needed. In addition, capacity and other computing resources, such as delivery of applications over the Internet, are usually sold by the hour, which helps reduce operating costs since retailers only buy the resources they need.

Savvis, which services more than 4,000 customers, offers a cloud computing model that allows retailers to outsource their computer processing and data storage and access that infrastructure on demand.

“Retailers need to have the right capacity to support their businesses during peak loads, but they don’t want to have servers being under-utilized during non-peak periods,” says Hokamp. “Cloud computing is the perfect solution to meet these needs.”

Choosing a partner

Once a retailer decides to turn to an outsourcer for help, it must establish criteria for selecting the right partner. When selecting a vendor for site performance monitoring it is recommended that retailers ask whether they can see site performance from an end-user perspective and determine how many shoppers are affected by a site error in real time.

“Synthetic testing is effective, but it can’t drill down to the actual delivery of applications and content to the end-user,” says Mouline. “Outsourcing partners need to be able to performance test right to the device used to access the site.”

Thorough testing processes are just one piece of the puzzle. Retailers also need to verify the outsourcer’s track record for consistently meeting performance standards set by the client. One way to do this is by talking to the vendor’s clients.

“Any good outsourcing partner will able to show they are experienced not only at managing varying loads, but that they meet the performance standards set by the client, not just industry standards,” says Hokamp. “If a retailer has customers that access their site through a mobile device, the outsourcing provider has to prove they can deliver the content to those customers in the right format.”