This year’s Black Friday was a real eye-opener to the fact that so many consumers are now abandoning the high-street and moving online during the big ticket sales events, to grab themselves a bargain without getting caught up in the crush that saw shoppers fighting over TVs in the aisles of supermarkets last year. With a number of big sales days on the near horizon, Michael Allen, Solutions VP, Dynatrace , outlines some key considerations for retailers to ensure they are fully prepared to handle the high levels of online traffic over the rest of the Christmas period.
Christmas is a time to eat, drink and be merry; relaxing with friends and catching-up with relatives. However, it’s also one of frenzied shopping, making it the singularly most critical calendar event of the year for retailers. As well as ordering in enough stock to satisfy the Christmas gift-buying bonanza, retailers are under pressure to tempt customers their way with a series of big ticket sales events; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day and then of course the eponymous January Sales.
In the past, these events have led to a rush on the high-street, but online shopping has gradually been eroding physical footfall over the past decade. This year’s Black Friday was a real eye-opener to the way things are going, with shoppers in the UK spending £1.1 billion online, up 36% from last year. Meanwhile, bricks-and-mortar stores were practically deserted, with baffled shop assistants left to watch the tumbleweed roll past. Equally interesting was that nearly half of online sales were made through tablets and smartphones, giving a clear indication as to the importance of having a mobile-optimised website and app.
Christmas miracle or poisoned chalice?
Looking at those numbers, it’s safe to say that the festive sales present a huge opportunity for online retailers. However, they’re also potentially a series of massive banana skins. In an increasingly e-commerce driven society, online and mobile retail outlets are becoming the first point of call for consumers. Therefore, managing the performance of an online store and app matters just as much, if not more, than making sure there’s enough stock on the shelves in-store.
Retailers that want to maximise their opportunity will need to focus on improving their web and mobile application performance, creating a competitive advantage by delivering the best digital customer experience they can. This places huge pressure on IT teams and digital business leaders to make sure their software and app functionality is in line with increasingly high shopper expectations. Our own research recently found that 47% of consumers will only wait three seconds for a mobile site or app to load before deciding to shop elsewhere, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for error. So what do retailers need to be doing to ensure the festive sales are a positive experience for their customers and their shareholders alike?
Make sure outages don’t become a Grinch
First, it’s vital for digital business platforms to be tested appropriately and thoroughly to ensure they’re prepared for the anticipated customer onslaught. Using existing production data during these tests, such as 2014’s Boxing Day sales figures, will ensure they track closer to the forecasted 2015 scenarios. IT teams need the ability to break down this information by geography and location, device and browser type and network conditions, to ensure that any intricacies affecting localised browsing sessions can be detected early enough to be dealt with. The key thing for retailers to remember is to implement these tests as early as possible, rather than just hoping things work out and planning to add a performance layer if the application doesn’t perform well enough come crunch time.
Get the festivities off without a hitch
According to the Aberdeen Group, a simple one-second performance delay in e-commerce response time reduces shopper conversions by 7%. It’s easy to see why this is especially pertinent during the festive sales period, when time is of the essence for shoppers looking to grab a bargain before they disappear. Therefore, it is vital that consumer expectations are met if retailers are to maximise their opportunity.
To combat slow loading speeds as online traffic rockets, retailers would be well advised to perform a thorough analysis of their content management systems (CMS) to ensure that they are flexible enough to manage the predicted levels of activity. In addition, they should also look to identify if poor web hosting or large numbers of DNS lookups and HTTP requests are present in their site performance logs, as these factors can all affect a site’s ability to meet the three second rule on web or mobile devices.
Make it a time for sharing
Timing is critical for retailers during the festive sales spikes; a ten minute outage or digital performance slowdown on Boxing Day or the first day of the January Sales could have a catastrophic impact on revenues. As such, having the ability to sense an impending problem and identify any potentially frustrated online shoppers is critical for everyone in the business, from regional sales managers to the CEO. As such, IT departments need the ability to derive live operational intelligence from application performance management data to ensure it can be shared instantly, in a format that is meaningful to a wide variety of stakeholders. This will help them to keep everyone in the business abreast of the full range of issues impacting on the customer experience in real-time, so they can work better as a team to make the festive sales the biggest success possible.
At its most basic, not prioritising digital performance management costs retailers during normal retail patterns, but to let it slip during the busiest time of the year could be an outright disaster. There’s no way to guarantee that online and mobile shoppers will have a totally hassle free experience, but if they’re proactively monitoring digital performance in real-time, retailers will be far better placed to intervene to prevent unnecessary frustration and ensure their customers walk away feeling jolly and bright.
Media agency ZenithOptimedia sees TV’s share of global TV ad spending declining for the next few years from 38% in 2015 to 34.8% in 2018.
ZenithOptimedia’s forecast calls for big changes in the way marketers allocate their money. The agency sees programmatic advertising accounting for 60% of digital display in 2016, Internet advertising overtaking television spending in 2018 and mobile advertising overtaking desktop advertising also by 2018.
Spending on TV will rise to $215 billion in 2018 from $206 billion in 2015, but its share peaked in 2012 at 29.7%.
The agency says one of the reasons for television’s share losses is the rapid growth of paid search. While search functions as a direct-response channel, the agency calls “television the pre-eminent brand awareness channel—and we expect it to remain so for many years to come.”
By Michael Allen
Solutions VP
Dynatrace
www.Dynatrace.com