subject: A Complete Guide For Retail Web Site Making Part-2 [print this page] Now you are reading the Part-2 of our A complete guide for Retail web site making series. In this we will expand on the information introduced in the Part-1.
Online playing such a critical role in holiday sales, it is impossible to ignore the real bottom-line costs in lost revenue of site slowdowns and outages. Site metrics and sales data show the revenue value of every site visitor, and site testing can show the actual cash lost when visitors abandon the site because of poor performance. As the accompanying chart shows, using actual results, a traffic spike 25 percent beyond the sites optimum capacity can cost $100,000 in lost revenue every hour.
This diagram illustrates actual results of a test of a major retailers Web site. The golden area illustrates that the more users who log on beyond the sites optimum capacity, the more revenue is lost. A spike of 25 percent results in losses in the neighborhood of $100,000 every hour.
Further, complicating matters is the huge unknown factor of mobile for 2010. With the tremendous and ever-accelerating proliferation of browser-equipped, app-loaded smartphones, mobile is sure to play a bigger role than ever, and likely to exceed even the most optimistic retailers projections. All those smartphones searching for products, comparing prices, and making purchases will be accessing the same back-end databases and applications as all the PC-based browsers, putting even more stress on e-commerce systems.
The first billion-dollar online day?
One likely milestone in the upcoming 2010 holiday season will be the first billion-dollar e-commerce day. Sales broke the $900 million mark on Green Tuesday (December 15 last year), and at least nine shopping days exceeded $800 million.iv A major east coast snow storm kept shoppers home-bound and contributed to brisk online sales. This year, mobile, with shoppers logging on even as they are out in the stores, is likely to have an even greater effect.
First things first: Updates
Getting a site into the near-final form it will have for the holiday season is the first step to making sure it will handle the demand. New features and functionalitylike enhanced product presentation, reviews, and personalization optionsshould be well under way if not complete by now. Sports fashion leader Lacoste is one retail marketer that understands the importance of readying major site revisions early.
Weve been working on a huge upgrade of our site and have been doing side-by-side testing with Keynote in order to measure the current experience against the new experience, Lacoste E-Commerce Director Maryssa Miller told Benchmark. Our criterion is to be better in performance than the current existing experience, even with all the new functionality. And we want to make sure that any kinks are worked out prior to the busy holiday season, obviously.
Were adding larger images with greater resolution, Miller continues. Were adding new features to be able to check your tax and shipping or your total costs much earlier in the process. Were also adding social networking toolsthe ability for people to more easily share products through any of the major social networks.
In Part-3 of this blog series, we will look at some more advanced best practices strategies, tactics and ideas.
