Online brands are reaping the rewards of burgeoning growth in eCommerce and mCommerce, and understand that they need to be prepared if they want to maximise potential sales during peak trading periods. But there are a number of best practices that all brands should adopt if they want to provide fast, reliable and secure user experiences on all devices.
The Christmas sales period of 2014/15 generated noticeably high online traffic peaks across Europe, and this trend is set to continue so retailers and brands need a thorough understanding of their websites’ capacities and vulnerabilities. By utilising load testing to simulate realistic peak traffic, they can discover any weak spots or breaking points on their back ends, and avert glitches in real user scenarios. By analysing annual online traffic growth and peaks and testing systems against these numbers to ensure the website won’t buckle, brands can be confident that they can support customers even during the busiest months. Whilst testing, they should consider modelling traffic load, including 3rd party content and plugins, and ensure the test covers every element of the transaction up to and including the payment gateway if possible.
With capacity demands understood, retailers and brands have to provide fast and secure content delivery to their customers. There are three key ways to accomplish this. First bring content closer to customers by getting it to the edge of the network for faster delivery. Then apply network-based optimisations to accelerate requests to the data centre or cloud provider. Finally, ensure the website is as lean as possible, taking into account mobile devices and network access connectivity, since serving unnecessary bytes impacts on performance, which will be amplified during peak periods.
Brands should take advantage of content and object pre-fetching to designate the pages that customers are likely to visit next, and cache non-personalised content to minimise round trips, enabling browsers to load and render an application faster. They could even have a separate, lightweight website for peak times whether it’s Christmas, Easter or booking the annual family holiday.
Even with the most rigorous preparation, there should always be a backup plan in place. Ideally it will include ‘visitor prioritisation’, a tool which allows retailers to place customers in a queue if back-end services are becoming overloaded. Brands need to think about where to place the queue. Load testing will highlight potential bottlenecks of each shopping scenario, so the queue is in the best place to deliver the most satisfying shopping experience.
Another important planning tool is an operational run book. This defines key components, contacts and dates for promotions and activities, and enables clients and partners to communicate better, enjoy faster response times and experience increased efficiencies in solving business-critical needs.
Although consumers have embraced mCommerce enthusiastically – our own data showing that 20% of all European Christmas shopping traffic came from iPads and 14% from Android devices – it is still difficult to say that mobile commerce is driving sales on the most popular shopping days. So it’s crucial that brands optimise their networks and applications to accommodate connected devices, but gain an understanding about the context and connectivity of their customers. Since consumers are always connected, brands have the opportunity, through technology and analytics, to gain a view of real-time user experiences, regardless of where users are and what devices they’re using.
To maintain interest and loyalty, a brand’s website and apps must be fast, reliable and secure under even the most demanding conditions, or customers will suspect reduced engagement, experience longer load times and eventually abandon their shopping baskets. They need to learn from previous peak shopping seasons and analyse the performance of their website and the experience of the customer. The key to success: be prepared.
By Enrique Duvos, Product Marketing Director, EMEA at Akamai Technologies.
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