Retail in Asia

In Trends

Expert Opinion: Accelerating omnichannel performance this Christmas

Retailers are racing to embrace the OmniChannel shopper this Christmas season. UK retailer Marks and Spencer recently reported that shoppers who use two channels for a purchase spend four times more than a customer who uses just one. Those who use three channels spend eight times as much. Catering to the demands and expectations of the omnichannel shopper is critical to ensuring the brand can capitalize on these incredibly valuable Christmas shoppers.

Perhaps one of the most under discussed but business critical aspects of serving the omnichannel shopper is site performance or how quickly pages can load regardless of device.

Many leading retailers are now beginning to shift the focus equally from mobilized content and capabilities to the quality of those web experiences, and in particular the performance.

Fast page speed accelerate purchases

Amazon and Google have always been vocal about the importance of site speed and have policies in place to ensure that no feature or capability is released that slow down the site experience.

Other leading retailers are now following suit, with US-based Staples instituting a similar policy this year in the lead up to the Christmas shopping season. Walmart provided a rare glimpse into their priorities with a response time study in February that demonstrated the direct correlation between page download times and not just engagement metrics, but revenue.

Their study found that for every 100 ms of incremental performance improvement, revenue grew by an additional 1 percent. Suggesting this is less than a coincidence, Amazon in 2009 found the exact same correlation between 100 ms of latency and a 1 percent drop off in revenue.

Shoppers themselves are voicing strong opinions about the trade-offs between functionality and performance. In a recent Google/Sterling Commerce survey, mobile shoppers indicated that pages loading in 5 seconds or less were their number one feature request, remarkably ranked above store locators and even the ability to complete a mobile purchase.

Foresee’s Mobile Satisfaction Index for Retail reveals that user satisfaction with mobile sites and apps is consistently well below desktop satisfaction. Outside of explicit surveys, shoppers consistently demonstrate they are more likely to be engaged and purchasing when working with a faster site.

In a Compuware Gomez study across 200 websites, there was a clear correlation between bounce rates and page performance. As page download times reached 10 seconds on a mobile device, over one in four visitors abandoned the website. Page download times under two seconds kept bounce rates below 5 percent.

Mobile page speeds 11 years behind

The average page speed of the top 30 ecommerce sites is now at three seconds, which is very near the goal of sub-two second response times in a 2010 Aberdeen Group study. Unfortunately the top 30 mobile commerce sites average three times that at nine seconds, with the top 200 clocking in at an average of 11 seconds. The last time desktop site performance was at nine seconds per page was back in 2001.

Retail mobile sites are effectively 11 years behind in mobile performance. And averages only tell a slice of this story, as it is not uncommon for some mobile site visitors to see response times upwards of 20 seconds.

With page download speeds topping 10 seconds, and bounce rates exceeding one in four visitors at these speeds, the opportunity to accelerate not just download times but mobile channel revenue is significant.

All devices are not equal

Unfortunately the complexity of solving the performance problem has skyrocketed with not just the diverse number of devices that are in the hands of consumers, but the diversity of the sources of the content as well. Desktop sites are hosted at the datacenter, but increasingly mobile sites are hosted with third party mobile providers. Content for all channels may be sourced from best of breed providers, like BazaarVoice for reviews or Scene7 for dynamic images. Mobile apps are often driven by a web services layer. Ensuring top performance across all devices and content can no longer depend on one-size fits all approach.

Measurement, intelligence, and optimization

The most important step to improving site performance is to begin measuring your web experiences on an ongoing basis. Performance monitoring services are beginning to offer ‘real end user monitoring’ solutions that look at the actual response times end users are seeing, regardless of device or connectivity. Correlating these measurements to key business metrics like revenue and conversion allow retailers to identify when to invest, and when to shift back to focus on features and capabilities.

To apply the right performance technique, it is important to have the intelligence in real time, to know exactly what experience to provide shoppers. Are they using a 3G connection on a smartphone or wi-fi on a tablet? Gaining that intelligence in real-time can allow retailers to be intelligent about the content they serve. For example, they may prefer to serve a higher quality image to a visitor on a strong connection and has a larger screen, but a lower quality image to a very poor connection and a smaller screen.

Finally, for mobile performance in particular, focus on front-end optimizations. 90 percent of the response time is in the delivery over the mobile operator networks and in the rendering of the page on the device. Specific techniques to reduce the number of requests – there are on average over 30 requests per mobile page – and reduce the size of images and content can have a dramatic impact on rendering times. While many of these techniques can be applied by developers, many retailers have found working with service providers to be much more effective and less labour-intensive process.

Prioritize performance

With mobile traffic and revenue projections exploding, yet the experiences falling so short of visitor expectations, it’s clear there is a significant near term opportunity to better engage our shoppers over all devices and ultimately drive more purchases. Retailers that prioritize the quality of experience, and the performance, will ultimately lead in capturing the Omnichannel shopper this holiday season.