With retail sites increasingly made up of content and functionality pulled from multiple sources, the retail adage “know your customer” is taking on a whole new meaning. It’s not enough today for online merchants to know what their customers are buying and what kind of marketing they respond to.
Imad Mouline, chief technology officer at Gomez Inc., tells Internet Retailer that to serve up a consistent shopping experience, web merchants also must know where the customers are connecting from, what browser they’re using, what version of that browser, what ISP and what operating system,
“The world’s changed. You need to be able to take all of that into account,” Mouline says.
Multiple connection points from a retail site’s back end all the way out to the individual browser used to access the site will affect the speed and availability of an individual customer’s experience with that retailer, Mouline says. And if any of those parts falters, regardless of whether the problem is actually at the retailer’s site or is attached to content or features the site pulls from third parties, it’s the retailer who’s apt to get the blame in the customer's view.
“Especially with this new technology, perception is key, not what is happening behind the scenes,” Mouline says, noting that Gomez’s testing and performance monitoring products now extend all the way out to determining which browser customers are using.
“You can’t just rely on Internet statistics that say, for example, that Internet Explorer has 85% of market share,” Mouline says. “You have to know if that’s really your customers.” The core audience of a consumer electronics retailer, for example, might tend toward a different browser, he says. Another way in which a site’s audience might differ from broader browser use statistics is when it has a large international component. For example, Mouline says, Gomez data across several verticals shows that in Germany, Firefox browsers might make up 50% or more of a site’s user base.
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