With the holiday season approaching, e-commerce companies are getting ready to face the competition and try to conquer a larger share of the customer spending. The fast-paced, online landscape is a serious challenge for e-commerce businesses today, and companies strive to meet and exceed customer expectations to gain their loyalty.
Past online shopping experiences influence whether or not a consumer will return to a site. The way shoppers are assisted from pre-purchase through post-delivery has an impact on their relationship with online retailers. The impersonal nature of a consumer’s relationship with the e-retailers makes it harder to build the same type of bond and loyalty that traditional retailers can try to establish with their own customers.
As the holiday season nears, Radware (News -Alert), a provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, released (on Tuesday of this week) new findings from two new studies, which aim to give eRetailers a "shopper's eye view" of how consumers perceive their relationships with online retailers. The research was to explore “how their webpages are actually seen by shoppers on desktop and mobile devices and how well their websites perform in real-world scenarios,” a CNBC post explains.
Radware's studies entitled "State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Fall 2014" report and "2014 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance," provide insight to what e-retailors plan (coming this holiday season) to attract and retain customer attention, by means of both e-commerce and m-commerce.
As per the Radware post, “eRetailers Fail to Deliver Satisfactory User Experience—Despite Expected Growth of Online Shopping.” Accordingly, the new studies, as the post points out, give valuable insights from Radware's analysis of the top 100 retail websites that helps answer what factors contribute to changes in Web speed and best practices that could give retailers an advantage over their competitors.
With eCommerce sales expected to hit an all-time high of $72 billion dollars, as per the post, many eRetailers will refine their Web site" to make it more “user-friendly," with easy navigation to locate and retrieve products, for example – all the while increasing response time of transactions. Simply put, online shoppers want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily; this determines the worthiness of the site.
Radware's two studies show it is essential for e-retailers to offer customers a straightforward and smooth online shopping experience, whether it is through desktop or mobile. The reports provide site owners with info and best practices to implement for the best possible user experience.
The following are key findings from Radware's reports on the top 100 retail sites:
- The median page is 19 percent larger than it was one year ago.
- 22 percent of sites took 10 or more seconds just to be become interactive.
- 2 percent took 20 seconds or longer to become interactive.
- While images comprise 50 percent of the average page's total weight, 35 percent of sites failed to compress images, a technique that could significantly reduce payload and streamline page rendering.
Radware’s other study tested 100 Ecommerce sites to see if they meet mobile shopper expectations; it wants to see if the website is fast enough for mobile shoppers. These are the key findings from the mobile report:
- 81 percent of sites automatically serve an m-dot version of the home page to smartphones.
- 20 percent of m-dot sites do not allow shoppers to access the full site.
- 8 percent of the top 100 retailers serve a tablet-optimized version of their site to tablets.
- Median load times varied across tablets, ranging from 5.7 seconds for the Galaxy Note to 8.1 seconds for the Nexus 7.
The design of a website can make or break the eRetailors’ commerce, and can be used as critical marketing aspects by a business. Companies realize the importance of having an online presence, but need also to focus on creating a website that generates traffic and keeps visitors on the page(s) longer. Ultimately, e-retailors want the customer returning to their website and possibly referring friends and family members to it too.
Radware sees an increase in the usage of mobile and claims it is overtaking desktop usage. With m-commerce thought to be booming, then e-businesses should concentrate more on enhancing the shopping experience for mobile users. (However, a ShopVisible’s 2013 year-in-review report found that mobile devices were responsible for 30 percent of website traffic but only 15 percent of online orders.)
When it comes to building better relationships with customers that result in repeat sales, the crowded online ecommerce arena forces e-businesses to create the finest shopping experience possible to build a reputation. Retailers who hope to maximize their eCommerce sales should strive to make it easy for shoppers to access, navigate, and buy from their website, regardless of device. Specifically, the Radware research reveals the importance of fast, reliable service to customer satisfaction.