A narrow view of site performance can cost retailers not only sales, but profitable, long-term customer relationships
When it comes to web site performance, retailers must guard against having tunnel vision. All too often site performance is measured simply as speed of page downloads and site uptime, when in reality there are a slew of other key performance indicators that retailers often overlook or may not even be aware of.
A recent survey by Harris Interactive conducted on behalf of Tealeaf Technology Inc. revealed that 42% of respondents that experienced a performance problem when shopping went to a competing retailer’s site or abandoned the transaction.
Performance problems other than speed of page downloads that can drive shoppers from a retailer’s site include links to an incorrect page or product, inability to add an item to the shopping cart, delays during checkout, incorrect page feeds, and poor navigation paths, all of which can negatively impact the shopping experience and cause shoppers to abandon the site and shop on a competitor’s site.
“Most retailers look at performance in a vacuum,” says Geoff Galat, vice president of marketing and product strategy for Tealeaf, provider of online customer experience management applications. “They don’t realize there are thousands of other little performance problems that can be related to site design, programming and search that negatively impact conversion.”
Creating the balance
Identifying the little problems that harm site performance requires having a baseline for performance, something many retailers neglect to establish. Consequently, their view of site performance is subjective, which can lead them to focus on the wrong issues, as opposed to weighing how each problem they identify can impact their business.
“Retailers need to view performance monitoring strategically rather than tactically,” says Matthew Poepsel, vice president, performance strategies for Gomez Inc., provider of web site performance monitoring services. “When performance is viewed tactically, it can lead to blind spots and over investment to correct problems that have little impact on the shopping experience or profitability. When performance is viewed strategically, retailers can align performance metrics to their business goals and focus on the metrics that help them achieve those goals.”
Lining up priorities
Aligning performance metrics with business goals starts with prioritizing the importance of each measurement. “Retailers need to ask themselves how each performance metric impacts conversions, abandonment rates and sales,” says Pedro Santos, senior product marketing manager for Akamai Technologies Inc., which has a computing network to accelerate retail web sites and applications.
Instead, many retailers put their energy behind fixing programming code or infrastructure problems, such as their connections to Internet service providers, even though that may not be the culprit, according to Santos. The reason is that in-house IT staffs are oriented to writing programming code and integrating the hardware infrastructure so that is where they focus when it comes to addressing performance issues.
As a result, retailers get bogged down adding infrastructure rather than looking at the Internet “middle mile” for performance, an area that has the biggest impact on customer satisfaction. “Retailers will spend a lot of money on fixing programming code and hardware infrastructure and still end up with poor site performance,” says Santos. “Until they look at all the performance problems areas and how they impact conversions and sales, it is difficult to figure out what to fix.”
Prioritizing performance metrics requires good communication between customer service, IT, marketing and merchandising about performance problems brought to their attention by customers or that are detected through site and load testing. “Successful retailers communicate performance metrics across all departments and with their technology partners,” says Poepsel. “Communication makes it possible to not only prioritize performance metrics, but also understand what the data says and to identify areas where improvements can be made and what kinds of dollars those improvements can yield.”
Once a performance problem is identified, retailers need to look at what the customer experienced when encountering the problem. This granular view helps retailers determine how widespread the problem is across the customer base. “There are problems that affect only a small percentage of customers. Without the ability to go back and review the customer’s shopping session, identifying the problem and the extent of it is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Tealeaf’s Galat. “Retailers have to be able to see what the shopper experienced that prevented them from converting or prompted them to abandon the site before they can properly assess the extent of the problem and correct it.”
Tealeaf’s survey on how shoppers respond to performance problems revealed that 31% left a retailer’s site and shopped at a competing site after encountering difficulty navigating the site. 30% said they experienced endless page loops that prevented the completion of a transaction. 14% said they abandoned the shopping session after receiving an error message.
Bad track record
One of the most surprising results to emerge from the survey is that 52% of respondents that contacted a customer service agent after experiencing a performance problem said they did not get their problem resolved and completely stopped doing business with the retailer.
“Getting a user session to the service agent can help them identify and resolve problems faster, because they can see the path that led to the problem,” Galat says. “The aim is to get beyond the quantitative to the qualitative to find out why a problem occurred and how many shoppers it affects when troubleshooting a problem. Once retailers know this data, they can determine the cost of the problem to their business, which helps them prioritize.”
The growing sophistication in how retailers identify and prioritize performance problems applies to speed of page downloads. As more retailers embrace rich media applications, such as Ajax, page weights become heavier, which slows the rate at which they are fed to a shopper. Specifically, web sites designed using Ajax require a higher than normal volume of data requests between the front-end web browser that delivers pages to the shopper and the back-end server that stores the page content, according to Akamai’s Santos.
“Response times are critical on key pages, especially when the shopper is conducting a search,” says Santos. “Response times not only have to meet the shopper’s expectations, especially for pages using rich media, but they also must be consistent across the entire customer base regardless of geography, date or time.”
After 4 seconds, Adios
To support his contention, Santos cites the JupiterResearch report “Retail Site Abandonment,” which says 33% of the 1,100 online shoppers surveyed abandon a site when page downloads take longer than 4 seconds.
Driving this trend toward higher performance expectations is the popularity of social networking web sites stocked with rich media content, such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which deliver pages in 1 second or less. “We have one client that gets a lot of customers from MySpace that has found they need to meet this requirement to keep those shoppers on their site,” adds Santos.
Akamai uses a network of 26,000 servers in about 70 countries to shorten the distances page downloads have to travel over the Internet to the shopper’s web browser. Using local servers makes it possible to utilize caching for pages designed using rich media applications. For search requests, Akamai, which can take up to 75% of a retailer’s computing power, determines the fastest path from the shopper’s web browser to the main server.
“Our infrastructure enables retailers to offload traffic from their main server, which provides them with on-demand scalability and relieves them of the cost of having to add servers and maintain them,” Santos says. “That’s a big plus when retailers are in a high-growth mode.”
One technique retailers cannot forget to employ when it comes to ensuring site performance is to proactively test site functionality, especially when the site design is changed, as is often the case when retailers move into a new selling season. Regular testing of site performance provides a baseline against which retailers can measure future performance
“Testing needs to be thorough, because any change to the site can cause a problem farther downstream that may go undetected for an indefinite period,” says Gomez’s Poepsel. “Retailers have to make it a priority to learn about how their site is performing, because they can’t predict what impact a change to the site may have, no matter how minor the change.”
Not business as usual
As part of its site monitoring services, Gomez provides page-level and transaction monitoring from more than 80 globally-located Internet backbone nodes and enables retailers to take last mile measurements at multiple connection speeds from up to 15,000 consumer PCs globally. In addition, Gomez provides web site monitoring services from agents inside the retailer’s firewall to determine whether a performance issue is internal or external. Performance is also measured from shoppers’ web browsers to identify the paths taken through the site and the impact that geography, ISP, browser size and type, operating system, and cache have on their experiences.
“Retailers can’t take a business-as-usual attitude when it comes to measuring web site performance,” Poepsel says “They have to pay close attention to the metrics used and learn how to interpret the data around those metrics so they understand the shopping experience being delivered.”
Once retailers understand the shopping experience they deliver, they can make changes in site performance that reduce the cost of servicing customers. “A lot of shoppers that experience a performance problem will call a service agent and the interaction, even if successful, makes the cost of the visit or transaction more expensive to the retailer,” says Poepsel. “Retailers want to minimize customer service interactions that center on site performance issues.”
In fact, Tealeaf, in its survey on site performance, found that 50% of respondents encountering a problem, no matter how minor, contact a service agent. Of those, 49% resolve their problems, not a particularly good track record, Galat says.
In many cases the performance problems service agents encounter are minor, such as shoppers incorrectly logging into their accounts or wish lists. Providing service agents with a record of the shopper’s current session makes it easier to identify and quickly rectify such problems.
“A lot of shoppers forget their passwords or user IDs or try to log into a password protected feature without registering,” says Galat. “Most of the time the problem and the situation are not clearly conveyed by the shopper and the service agent ends up asking a lot of questions or guessing what the problem is. Providing service agents with a record of a shopper’s session converts them from being diagnosticians to problem solvers, which is what shoppers want.”
Enabling service agents to solve performance issues is certain to improve customer retention and loyalty and boost conversion rates, as shoppers will come to know help is available. Nevertheless, retailers need to do everything possible to eliminate performance issues, especially those that may impact a small, but high spending percentage of customers.
Falling tolerance
“As online shoppers become savvier they have less tolerance for site performance problems,” says Akamai’s Santos. “In today’s competitive environment, retailers can’t afford to lose customers because of performance issues.”
Ultimately, retailers need to look at site performance as a sales, marketing, and customer retention tool, because there is more at stake than losing a sale if a customer abandons a site due to poor performance.
“If a customer goes to another site, the retailer doesn’t lose just a sale, they risk losing a profitable long-term customer relationship,” says Poepsel. “If retailers haven’t made understanding how site performance impacts their business a priority, they ought to do so and quick, because competitors have taken that step.”
In other words, consistent, quality site performance equals success.
