Prepare Your Ecommerce Website for This Holiday Shopping Traffic Surge
Written by Neha Madiya
Lead Technical Content WriterA one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversion
You sure don't want to let those dollars go, especially during the Holiday season.
Instead, you'd strategize to scale your sales by 5X or more.
Gone are the days where the start of the holiday season makes eager customers line up at the shopping mall or rush to a nearby retail store for amazing offers. Shopping this year, much like last year, is likely to be different owing to the pandemic situations across the globe.
According to a Forbes e-commerce survey in 2020 of 100 plus retail IT managers, 72% said their customers experience slow load times during the holidays. In addition, half said they see high bounce rates, inconsistent performance and site functionality not working as it should.
In 2020, several big brands faced technical challenges during the Black Friday weekend.
Source: digitalcommerce360
According to a report by Salesforce, 57% prefer moving to a new seller for a better purchase experience offered by a competitor.
Retailers should embrace digital strategies to meet customer demands with deals and discounts for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and that flows through Cyber Monday. The holiday season is the time of anxiety for all retail businesses that depend on their websites for attaining business profit and revenue. Preparing the test strategy for the e-commerce websites to understand and measure the complexities is also the need of the hour for retailers.
Is your risk mitigation plan in place?
A best practice is to have a strategic, solid plan for website performance year-round that paves the way for improved activity and drive traffic during the holidays. When an e-commerce site is down, it costs several thousand dollars in revenue for a retailer. Therefore, it's always mandatory to prepare for peak holiday with traffic forecast, comparing with previous year's sales, to have a risk-mitigation plan in place. To keep your holiday readiness model streamlined and efficient, undertaking performance testing in every delivery and QA process is vital.
Why is Performance Testing Essential for Holiday Readiness?
Website performance testing is rapidly becoming inevitable and the core business strategy for every retailer. From a sheer commercial business perspective, it is imperative to understand customers' tastes and their behavior. Gauging the peak and fall of user's activity on the commerce website unleash greater opportunities and possibilities to create a market-ready commerce platform. A brand or retailer can offer a seamless, compelling shopping experience with a comprehensive performance testing approach.
Some of the key metrics to be calculated are:
Average time of a visitor on the site
Shopping vs browsing interactions of users
Average view per minute/hour
Identification of traffic flow from mobile devices
Accessing the overall traffic patterns
Factors to consider while testing your e-commerce site
Business and technical priorities need constant check and test, while performance factors such as load time play a vital role during holiday seasons.
Delivering exceptional customer experience and satisfaction augment retailers' sales and profit, avoiding a large chunk of their annual revenues. However, a site's poor performance during peak holidays leads to unhappy customers who would easily switch brands and websites even with the most minor issues.
- Speed: The application site should load and open quickly without any glitches, in both favorable and unfavorable situations
- Stability: Irrespective of user loads, the application must run stable
- Scalability: Even when the users are loaded across the application drastically, the website should perform at its best
Performance testing for holiday readiness must check device, server, network and API performance criteria as well.
Checklists for basic metrics to evaluate
- Application installation and loading time
- Application performance under different network conditions
- Checking for any interferences in the application performance when several apps run in parallel
- Battery consumption and memory allocation
- Check response times for the most common use cases
- Verify the most typical use cases: creating a new account, logging in, purchasing, upgrading/downgrading subscription level, etc.
All these factors are critical and considered an essential part of performance testing for achieving maximum revenue potential throughout the holiday season
Set your website right for the holiday season
There are many performance testing tools available in the market to choose just the right tool to build an effective commerce platform. However, it is also equally important to have intelligent teams with the right skills and responsibilities to implement performance testing.
Is your SAP Commerce site tuned for optimum performance?
Kick start your go-to-market strategy in record time that helps you deliver a seamless shopping experience to your customers. Get in touch with Royal Cyber experts today.
