Don’t take site performance for granted, webinar tells retailers
ShopNBC.com and Safeway.com offered tips on monitoring web site performance as Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson warned retailers not to take performance for granted during a webinar today sponsored by Internet Retailer, Xaffire Inc. and Jupiter.
Although most online customers express satisfaction with their shopping experiences on retail web sites, 21% say they are generally dissatisfied with the online ordering process and 22% say they’re unhappy with the delivery process, according to research from ForeSee Results noted by Kurt Peters, editor of Internet Retailer and moderator of the webinar, which had 200 viewers. “There’s room for improvement,” he said.
“Performance is something you can’t take for granted,” added Peterson. He noted that some retailers have the misconception that the spread of broadband Internet connections is making web site performance a non-issue.
A poll conducted during the webinar of its viewers, however, found that 34% had no strategy for measuring web site performance and another 15% didn’t know if they had one.
The two most important things to monitor in web site performance, Peterson said, are page response times, especially for home pages and product pages, and the speed of a site’s checkout process.
Joe Devine, CTO of Safeway.com, said Safeway expects its pages to take no more than 4-6 seconds to load for dial-up customers, though Peterson noted that 8 seconds or less could be within the expectations of dial-up users.
Steve Craig, CTO of ShopNBC.com, said ShopNBC divides its monitoring approach into three segments: checking page availability and load times for both broadband and dial-up customers, then comparing that to industry benchmarks; tracking visitor page-viewing activity, identifying the events that led to any problems; and running customized reports to, for example, see if the site processed too many or too few orders in the past 60 seconds.
Devine noted that retailers also need to get direct feedback from customers on site performance. “The best monitoring solution in the world can’t tell you everything,” he said. But customers, he added, “can identify things that you can’t get from after-the-fact analysis” from monitoring systems.
David Jilk, president and CEO of Xaffire, added that customers don’t always remember all that actually happened when a site problem occurred. “Transaction recording fills the gap,” he said. By combining information from the customer, such as the time a problem occurred, with the information recorded in a monitoring system, a retailer can go back to find such crucial information as the pages a customer viewed and how fast they loaded, he said.
Copies of the webinar, “Every Shopper Counts: Taking Web Site Performance to a New Level,” will be available on Internet Retailer‘s web site, InternetRetailer.com.
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