What's Next After Moving Your Business Online?
The e-commerce market has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year due to the change in consumer behaviors during shutdowns and social distancing.
Technology has played a critical role in enabling businesses to sell their goods and services online from anywhere, anytime. It has also altered how consumers interact with online sellers as well as the way they decide which brands to go for. With more brands moving online, competition in the e-commerce world is getting tougher than ever.
To stand out in the market, what should you do next after bringing the business to the online battleground?
It’s performance monitoring.
Why is Performance Monitoring Necessary for Every Online Business?
Speed, stability and omnichannel experience are three critical winning factors in operating an online business. Only by constantly monitoring your websites or applications, you will be capable to understand how your storefronts are performing, and implement continuous improvements to ensure a satisfying customer experience - which is a top priority for e-commerce.
1. Speed
Speed impacts conversions and sales directly as online shoppers expect lightning experience nowadays. Research has shown that 47% of online shoppers expect webpages to load in two seconds or less. The bounce rate and conversion rate get worse for every second it takes a site to load - a two-second delay during a sales transaction results in abandonment rates of up to 87%.
To ensure page speed is not harming your business metrics, firstly you have to understand whether the speed of your e-commerce platform is performing well. If not, you will need to identify the root cause - whether it is caused by the page weight, file sizes, the hosting infrastructure, or the network, etc.
2. Stability
Customers are expecting an always-available uptime for a platform they trust. A website or application downtime will lead to unsatisfied user experience, loss of credibility, dropping sales and lower search engine rank.
There are many different reasons why your online storefront might go down at some point - it can probably be caused by server overload, coding errors, hardware issues or cyber attacks like DDoS, etc. With an aim to drive the downtime to zero, you do not just need to have a disaster recovery plan in place, proactive monitoring is also of the essence to predict possible failures before an actual outage happens.
3. Omnichannel Experience
73% of customers use multiple channels during a purchase journey. Today's retailers tend to make their offerings available across different channels in order to reach customers no matter they are shopping online from a laptop or a mobile device.
Once you have decided to take the multi-channel e-commerce approach, you have to make sure the user experiences are equally pleasant across different channels like desktop browser, mobile websites or mobile applications. By evaluating user behaviors through their experience journeys, you will be able to correlate performance and conversions at each step by device type, browser type or OS.
Consistently monitoring your sites allows you to measure and track response time, loading time and errors that can impact the performance of your store. With a wide and deep visibility into performance issues, you will be able to discern the causes and fine tune slow loading issues, prevent downtime or improve customer experiences across different sales channels.
Some leading applications performance management solutions offer experience journey mapping to discover end-user issues at source. They can also correlate performance data and alerts to help you proactively manage underlying issues before they impact your business.
Get in touch to learn more about how you can maintain flawless website or application performance in order to ensure a better success in the digital battleground.
About KBQuest
As a global digital transformation consulting firm with more than 1,300 professionals, KBQuest transforms clients’ digital journeys by committing to their success.
With our extensive industry experience and a strong track record in Cloud, Analytics and Digitalization, we tailor end-to-end digital strategies to transform businesses. Our consultation, strategy development, solution implementation and managed services empower clients to achieve their business goals through technology.
We guide businesses to outperform the competition.
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