A Complete Guide For Retail Web Site Making
OVERVIEW : Welcome to the first Part in the A complete guide for Retail web site making series.
In this blog series, we are going to talk about best practices, methodology & modeling and more importantly, how you can maximize the effectiveness and ultimately the profitability of your Retail Website.
If any retailer needs proof of the importance of
load testing, they need only look to the headlines around the launch of the new Apple iPhone 4. All day on June 15, Apple and AT&Ts online stores went down and out. Tech bloggers spent hours trying to place online orders, and hours more on hold with customer service. An official announcement from AT&T called it the busiest online sales day in AT&T history. Yet despite the problems, they managed to sell out their first days allotment before the day was out.
Retailers dream of having such problems as rolling out a new blockbuster and taking orders for 600,000 units in one day. But you can count on one hand the number of sellers who command such fanatic loyalty and patience. For the rest, site outages, freezes and checkout failure mean lost revenue that will likely never be made upand those losses mount minute by minute, hour by hour, especially during the peak holiday season, when most retailers rack up most of their annual business. During those critical four to six weeks at the end of the year, when the site breaks, the bottom line breaks, too.
So: its August or later as youre reading this. The biggest, most successful online retailers have been prepping their sites for the holidays for six or seven months now. The next tier started in June. Retailers who have not started to stress test their sites could be looking at many sleepless nights come the last months of the year, and potentially serious hits to their 2010 revenues.
Online makes the bottom line
Theres no underestimating the importance of e-commerce to overall retail success, particularly during the crucial holiday season. Every year from 2000 through 2007, online sales posted double-digit growth, handily outpacing in-store sales.1 And last year, as retail struggled to recover from its worst holiday ever (in 2008), online holiday sales grew at four times the rate of total retail growththough admittedly modest growth, at 4 percent for online sales,2 and just 1 percent for total retail.3 (For the year, e-commerce sales grew 2 percent, while overall retail sales fell by nearly 3 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.)
In Part-2 of this blog series, we will expand on the information introduced in this first module by looking at some more advanced practices strategies, tactics and ideas.
Source note:
U.S. Department of Commerce
comScore press release, comScore Reports $29.1 Billion in U.S. Retail E-Commerce Spending for Full November-December Holiday Season, UP 4 Percent vs. Year Ago, 1/6/2010
Internet Retailer, Total holiday retail sales rise 1%, trailing e-retails 4% increase
by: Keynote
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