SPONSORED SUPPLEMENT:Improving the online shopping experience—one customer at a time

Internet Retailer Web Design Conference 2009

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

Once there was a time when web site performance meant site availability and page download time. But as online shoppers and online retailers have become more sophisticated, so has the notion of web site performance. Availability and page download times are coming more and more to be viewed as equivalent to having the store’s doors open and the lights on. They’re only the entry points to a customer experience; they are not the experience itself.

Retailers need to focus more on individual users’ experiences every bit as much as they focus on monitoring uptime and server availability, argues a group of site performance monitoring companies. “Definitions of downtime usually miss one dimension completely,” says David Jilk, CEO of site performance monitoring company Xaffire Inc. “They focus only on when the whole site is down, not when individual users can’t use the site.”

Retailers’ attention needs to be on all the things that make up a user experience, these vendors say. “We monitor the real performance of web sites and record every visitor, what they do, how long the pages take to load,” says Mike Dickey, CEO of ClickCadence, creator of the BeatBox monitoring product.

A number of perspectives

Online retailers today are looking at site performance from a number of perspectives. At one level is the monitoring of performance so as to know the experience the shopper is having. At another level is anticipating what shoppers will want and making sure that the site is ready to deliver when the shopper is ready to receive. And that calls for changes in the way retailers approach the Internet. “You have to be savvy in the ways you measure performance,” says Bob Hammond, CTO of Mirror Image Internet, a network for the delivery of online content, applications and transactions. “A lot of people think if they have a big pipe to the Internet, they’re fine.”

Not necessarily so, Hammond says. He argues that retailers need a distributed network to house and deliver what the shoppers want remotely, not from a centralized server. “The real value proposition that we offer is the ability to offload graphics and middleware,” he says. “That in turn makes the site richer to attract a larger set of folks and it allows retailers to add navigational features that make the site more interactive although heavier to deliver.”

Xaffire is one of the newest entrants into the web site performance monitoring business. It has created web site monitoring and recording capability in a software diagnosis product called Xfire that records all user sessions, scans them for problems, then allows tech support to replay the session to identify the problems.

That solves a big problem, Jilk says: “You’re limited to only a few ways to resolve a software problem,” he says. In most computing environments, tech support can ask the user what the problem was and try to walk trough a re-creation and resolution. Because of the self-service nature of the web, that’s usually not possible with online customers. “A bug might happen only when a certain confluence of events takes place,” Jilk says. “The only way to see what happened is to record the transaction.”

That, in turn, gives tech support insight into the session that’s not otherwise available, Jilk says. “Support personnel can see what the user saw and what was happening at the time the error occurred,” he says. “The industry generally talks of end-to-end application performance monitoring. But that excludes the end point—the user’s request to the server and the server’s response.”

Supplementing automated information

Xaffire identifies problems with a site in a couple of ways. For starters, the retailer can program the system to send an alert when certain error pages occur. “Certain type of errors contain certain words,” he says, “such as ‘database error’ or ‘sql error’ or ‘odbc.’” When tech support receives such an alert, a staffer can retrieve the problem session, then scroll through it to find where the problem occurred.

Jilk points out that the scanning program assumes the retailer knows what the problem is likely to be in the first place. So retailers need to supplement it with feedback from the call center so as to catch problems that a manager would not anticipate. The retailer needs to train the call center staff to issue alerts to the appropriate support personnel if customers are calling with complaints or phoning in their orders because they can’t complete them online, Jilk says. The tech staff then needs to obtain some identifying information from the call center reps to start diagnosis of the problem.

Support staff can search on any piece of that information, including keywords, to cull possible problem sessions from the log. Then they flip through the various possible sessions until they find the problem. “There’s a certain element of manual process here, but you have to compare it to having no idea at all what happened to these users,” Jilk says. “It’s so drastically easier than what they have had to do before.”

Whether the problem comes to tech support’s attention from the scan of the site or the call center, the next job is to isolate the problem. That occurs as the support staffer replays the session looking for the problem transaction. When he spots it, he exposes and analyzes the source code, zeroing in on the problem.

While the Xfire product is designed specifically for the IT operation of an organization, the problems that it identifies are not always technical problems, Jilk notes. “A user error could be a design issue,” he says. “In fact, there are some who believe there is no such thing as user error. It’s bad design.”

Entry level price for the Xfire product, which is a hosted solution, is $25,000, which will support two web servers. Additional servers are $5,000 each. Xaffire is rolling the product out now after development trials for several months. It is live with La Quinta hotels’ web site and the company reports it is in serious talks with several major retailers.

Capturing and filtering data

ClickCadence takes a similar approach as its starting point. Its BeatBox appliance can capture all the data that a retailer needs to analyze user sessions, Dickey says. “We monitor the real performance of the web site and record every visitor, what they do, how long the pages take to load, and so on,” he says.

In that process, the BeatBox can filter out certain traffic and look for specific events, such as if the retailer wants to know when visitors viewed particular products, Dickey says. Once that process is completed, it then normalizes the information, that is, puts it into a standard format so it can be used in multiple reports, then aggregates the data, grouping multiple occurrences into blocks of time, for instance. “A retailer may not need to know every time someone lands at a page, but rather the number of times people landed at a particular page,” Dickey says. “With real-time processing of clickstream data, we collect, clean and filter as it’s being gathered and written to a disk.”

In addition, ClickCadence has integrated the BeatBox service with Quova, the geolocation service. The system can pinpoint a shopper’s city, state, country, network information, such as the user’s ISP, and the connection type—dial-up or broadband.

ClickCadence’s BeatBox is a monitoring box with a Linux-based operating system that taps into Internet browsers and servers. GSI Commerce, which operates more than 40 web sites for retailers who want to outsource their online operations, uses BeatBox to report customer behavior and system performance. With BeatBox, GSI eliminated web logs, which saved on storage costs while increasing server and network performance, the company says. It reports that offloading such tasks to BeatBox decreased server load by 30%.

Buy or rent

ClickCadence offers BeatBox in a number of ways. Customers can purchase it as an appliance that they install and maintain in their own data center at a cost of $50,000 plus 20% a year in ongoing maintenance. Back-up BeatBoxes cost $25,000 each, Dickey says.

It also offers BeatBox in managed service offerings. In its original managed service plan, a retailer rents a BeatBox at ClickCadence’s server center and contracts with ClickCadence to understand what to measure, how to evaluate what they learn and then how to create the reports needed to take action.

Its latest offering takes the managed service a step further and helps customers understand how to make the changes needed to improve site performance. “We found that customers have changing needs and needed help in what to look for and how to implement changes,” Dickey says. “There is a market for fully managed solutions.”

The entry level cost for fully managed services is $2,500 month, which will support up to 500,000 visits a day and includes one BeatBox. “We had customers who liked what we were doing, but didn’t want to spend upfront costs,” Dickey says. “They were looking for less risk upfront.”

The company expects that strategy will broaden the market for the BeatBox. “We’re opening our technology now so it’s available to the entirety of the market,” Dickey says.

Getting their data hands dirty

Customer reaction to the managed services offering has been very good, Dickey says, noting, however, that the company has 50 large retail sites that have bought BeatBox as an appliance. ClickCadence and BeatBox started as part of a larger company four years ago, but became independent in 2002, Dickey says. “We’ve had lots of success selling technology as an appliance for customers who want to do data warehousing and get their hands dirty,” he says.

Given that the web is an ever-changing environment, ClickCadence stresses the flexibility of the BeatBox and the ability it provides to retailers to change what they measure and how they measure as conditions change or situations develop. “Most retailers have something in mind they want to measure,” Dickey says. “But once they start measuring one thing, it inspires them to want to measure something else and it becomes an iterative process. The more you have, the more you want to know.”

Retailers can make changes as they go, he adds. “You can change the reports and the data you collect on the fly without changes to the web site,” Dickey says. “You don’t have to create new reports or put in new tags. You just tell your BeatBox you want to collect different data.”

Outsource delivery—and measure

Mirror Image Internet approaches web site performance issues from two points of view. On the one hand, it provides the means for retailers to deliver content that will engage shoppers and make them more likely to make a purchase. On the other hand, it offers a service that allows retailers to view the performance of Mirror Image’s network. “You have to use a measurement tool to make sure the site performs way you want it to perform and make sure the network lives up to its claims,” Hammond says.

Mirror Image employs Internet monitoring company Keynote Systems as part of its service-level agreements with clients. “We are providing an industry-leading SLA by employing a third party to monitor our performance,” Hammond says.

Mirror Image operates a network of 21 what it calls “content access points” around the world from which it distributes content and logic for web-based customers. Among the retail and consumer brands it counts as customers are such well known names as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., Lillian Vernon Corp., Orvis Co. Inc., LEGO and Hasbro. Others are in the pipeline. “We’ve seen strong growth in the past four to six months,” says Frank Brilliant, Mirror Image’s vice president of sales and marketing. Brilliant says traffic on Mirror Image’s network grew threefold over the last quarter vs. the prior quarter.

Hammond says the company’s foundation is the ability to distribute content across the globe, provide performance stability and protect sites from being overwhelmed by flash crowds. “Our clients no longer have to build out a large infrastructure,” he says. “It’s always hard to build sites to the largest need you think you’ll have, Christmas, for instance.”

Using Mirror Image’s services means only a small infrastructure investment because Mirror Image has already built the network. “In this model, you build the minimal site and outsource the capacity to our network,” Hammond says.

Global reach at a high performance level is usually beyond the abilities of retailers—or at least beyond their desire to make the investments necessary to create such a capacity. “The core competency of a retail site is not the web site itself, but the products it sells,” Hammond says.

Doing new things

Thus outsourcing to a network improves a retailer’s ability to compete online, he says. “The ability to do high performance across the globe enables them to do things they could never do before,” he says.

Furthermore, integration with the Mirror Image network is easy, he says. “That gives them the ability to bring on capacity almost instantaneously,” he says. In addition, Mirror Image licenses all the necessary software for graphics and image production, taking another management headache off the business and IT sides of a retail operation. “They can provide richer, heavier pictures, use Flash and other high-fidelity graphics without a lot of licenses,” Hammond says.

At the same time that Mirror Image provides content and performance monitoring to clients, it also allows them to control how the content is distributed to end users by setting operating rules that they can change on the fly as situations evolve. “Merchandisers get to control the merchandising function, much like they do in brick-and-mortar stores,” Brilliant says. “You have control of your stuff while it’s on our network. Retailers really get this, especially if you talk to the business and marketing sides.”

Mitigating the risk

Entry-level cost starts as low as $10,000 a year. An average cost is $20,000-$40,000 a year, depending on volume and platform, Brilliant says. A site planning for 35% growth a year, which is typical of retail web sites, would probably spend $100,000-$125,000 a year building additional capacity, plus the costs of operation and maintenance. Over three years, the cost could amount to $3 million to build, then expand and maintain the necessary network capacity, Brilliant says. “Mirror Image cost is a fraction of ownership cost,” Brilliant says.