subject: How To Bag Outstanding Holiday Performance [print this page] eBags.coms Mike Frazzini talks about handling the holiday crush and achieving breakthrough performance on desktop and mobile.
The holidays can make or break a retailers numbers, and online retailers are no exception. Ensuring flawless site performance and the ability to handle surges in holiday traffic is key to online success. eBags.com has ingrained performance management into its corporate culture, from the C-suite down through every department, and the results prove the difference it can make. In 2011, nearly flawless availability and super speed helped eBags.com rack up a record-breaking holiday, and theyre planning to do it again this year. Benchmark talked to Vice President of Technical Operations Mike Frazzini to get a taste of eBags.coms secret sauce thats behind their category-leading performance.
Benchmark: Its the time of year when online retailers should be well into their preparations for the holiday season. eBags.com had a really big year last year. What are you expecting this year?
Mike Frazzini: Last year was actually amazing. This year were expecting it to be much bigger. Weve made a huge number of site improvements, both the user experience and functionality, as well as under the covers with our platform to improve performance and availability.
Benchmark: With the record year you had last year, can you tell us a little bit about the performance of your sites? Did you have any hiccups?
Mike Frazzini: It really performed flawlessly over the holiday season. We achieved greater than four 9s availability and we smashed our performance goals over that time as well.
Benchmark: Do you publish those performance goals? Can you share them?
Mike Frazzini: Obviously we have a lot of detailed goals, but at a high level our directional performance goals are under two seconds for desktop page load. And thats all in all dependent requests and any third-party objects that may be called on the page.
Were expecting under two seconds for the home page and some of the major department pages. And we add a second to that for mobile.
Benchmark: Just one second? And are you achieving that?
Mike Frazzini: On the desktop we achieved that during the holiday. Were still baselining mobile and we understand that is an aggressive goal, but thats what were trying to achieve.
Benchmark: So obviously you did a lot of things right last year in terms of getting your site ready. What are you doing this year to prepare for even more traffic? Is it a repeat of what you did last year? Are you doing anything differently?
Mike Frazzini: We had such great success last year, so we are, as you would imagine, repeating a lot of the same process. Weve institutionalized a scalability and performance task force that I actually chair. Its a cross-functional team throughout the organization. It includes people from our marketing team, graphic design team, our architecture and software development team and a lot of the infrastructure and admin teams.
We meet regularly to review performance and Keynote is actually a big part of that. We go through a huge deck of reports every week, and Keynotes probably a good 40 to 50 percent of what we review to help us assess website performance across four major areas: One is site infrastructure network and servers. Two is the application itself, the website application and application stack. Three is graphic design and layout, and four is any marketing third-party objects that are involved and that impact site performance.
So thats a lot of what weve done and what we did last year. Were certainly repeating that, in more depth really. In addition, weve upgraded our web application platform, upgraded dot-net. Were almost a complete dot-net shop at this point with respect to our web application. And were expanding our load testing efforts. We did a pretty extensive load testing effort last year again with Keynote and were expanding that this year to test more areas of the website, and in addition, to do much more in-depth testing of our mobile site.
Benchmark: How does your testing for mobile differ from your desktop testing? What do you do additionally beyond your standard desktop performance program?
Mike Frazzini: Well, last year we didnt test it as thoroughly. We didnt test it at the same level we tested the desktop site. This year we are, so it differs this year only that were trying to normalize it with what we do for desktop site testing.
Benchmark: How did you arrive at the decision to create the taskforce, and how has it been accepted or embraced organizationally?
Mike Frazzini: Let me go back two and a half years. We found that over the years, eBags has had varying success at achieving our world-class performance and availability goals. And we found that as long as we were focused on performance and scalability, we did quite well.
But there would be times throughout the course of an effort, a development season if you will, where we took our focus away from scalability and performance, and it would decline, as you would expect. So we realized that its not just a one-time effort or even a seasonal effort. Its got to be something thats institutionalized into the culture of not only software development, but the entire company.
Fortunately our CEO and CTO and senior leadership highly value performance. They understand that its not just a hygiene factor for e-commerce, its a motivator. It can improve conversion rates and it certainly improves the experience. And in addition to that, were measured in the industry, from Internet retail publications that publish numbers to even the Keynote benchmarks that are published. We take those things seriously and we want to make sure that were putting in a world-class showing.
And additionally, we came to realize through our marketing team that our SEO efforts which weve been very successful at over the years particularly with Google, but with the other major search engines as well our SEO efforts were threatened by poor performance and Google was penalizing companies with poor performance. So we wanted to make sure that we were not penalized and that our SEO efforts were not injured by performance.
So a lot of these things came together and we had the realization that this just needed to be an ongoing effort. And everyone I think understood from prior experience that its not just a software development or even just an IT focus, it needs to include all the people who have a stake and responsibility control over important things like, again, third-party pixels that marketing may want to implement on the site, or our graphic design group, which does not reside in IT.
We found there are just as many performance opportunities with the graphic design and layout as there are with the network and system infrastructure and the Web application itself. So everyone understood that we needed to make this a cross-functional team across several different departments.
We realized great gains and doubled our performance in terms of page download from the beginning of last year to the point the holiday season started. So everyone understands how valuable this is and how important it is to keep this discipline.
Benchmark: So that was three years ago. Have you stayed basically with the same site? Any major rebuilds since then?
Mike Frazzini: Yes, actually, weve just recently rebuilt it. As were continuously building out the site experience and features on the desktop site, were upgrading the mobile site along the way.
Benchmark: Does the mobile site access the same backend in terms of all of your product listings and data?
Mike Frazzini: Yes, 90 percent of it.
Benchmark: Do you have a specific strategy for tablets? Different from mobile?
Mike Frazzini: Were evolving the desktop site to be able to support the tablet user as well. So we do definitely have a different strategy for it. We feel its very important. Were seeing huge growth in it, particularly after last holiday season we saw a significant spike in user agents and platforms that are associated with tablets. Its definitely very important to us. Were concentrating now on just making sure our desktop site controls are consistent with the tablet experience, making sure that a lot of the gestural-type controls are compatible and work well.
Benchmark: What is your take on social? People have been talking about social commerce for some time now, but for many businesses, it has yet to take on a big role. Whats your perspective?
Mike Frazzini: Its considered really an expected part of the experience with e-commerce now, and youll see, looking at both of our sites, handbags.com and ebags.com, that we have extensive social integration, from underlying open graph tags that optimize the suggestion of our site content on some of the social sites to things like the obvious Facebook like buttons.
We have Pinterest integration, we have an extensive amount of social integration already, and itll continue to be a focus. So its definitely an expected part of being an e-retailer online. Were also about to roll out an expanded authentication, OAuth authentication, feature as well. So yes, we continue to integrate more social thats a really good point.
Benchmark: What do you see on the horizon? What trends do you see impacting the way you do business?
Mike Frazzini: Kind of along the same lines continued expectation of responsive design and richer experiences. Itll continue to be a focus on availability and performance and making sure that, as we make the site more usable and richer, that we dont degrade performance. The feature sets that are key to our category, as a specialty retailer, its very important to us that we have features and a site and an experience that conveys that expertise that were not just some giant online retailer that sells everything.
Benchmark: And your passion shows, both in your products and on your sites. We hope its a great holiday season for you.
