Boden prevents revenue leakage from poor online customer shopping experience

30 November - SciVisum today announced that it has been appointed by Boden, one of the UK’s leading online fashion retailers, to undertake stress testing on its online web site ahead of key business periods. SciVisum, the website testing specialist, will undertake bi-annual stress testing of the Boden web site.

Boden appointed SciVisum after identifying weaknesses in its e-commerce infrastructure during the spring season shopping period. SciVisum has defined a series of tests to identify whether the web site is able to handle web traffic levels at any time.

The Boden web infrastructure team made engineering changes both on the web farm servers and with the hosting ISP's infrastructure to improve the online customer experience when ordering.

High volume traffic tests have proved that the site is able to handle 100Mbit/sec traffic.. This level of testing required SciVisum to develop a careful selection of the target pages and components and clever test injector scripting, to minimise server load whilst simultaneously maximising bandwidth load.

Other test phases have examined user journeys through the site. A user journey emulates how real users navigate the site - such as looking for products by drilling down through menus - and how they exercise the main functional blocks of the system. User journeys included the 'add to cart' and 'proceed to checkout' functionality.

Boden has 450,000 individual customers. Initially launched as a pure men’s wear catalogue, its success drive continued into womenswear and children’s wear. Today 2,000 orders are despatched daily by 400 staff from the company’s warehouse in Leicester. Overseas expansion into the US market is well underway.

SciVisum’s testing has contributed to understanding the performance capacity of the website and the keynote for us is it really assists us in planning and budgeting on the website to ensure we meet planned future customer demand. We are planning to run the tests again in six months time, this time including our US web farms. We believe this process will help us keep ahead of our ever-increasing online customers, providing them with a consistent and enjoyable e-shopping experience.

said Boden's e-commerce infrastructure manager.

For a business such as Boden that uses the web as primary channel, frustrated web browsers very quickly translates to lost customers, and lost revenue. Site staging and exhaustive web testing should form a key component of any e-commerce strategy

said Deri Jones, managing director, SciVisum.

In addition, SciVisum's website monitoring of the same journeys as load tested, replaces earlier use of basic siteuptime monitoring of static URLs - which simply didn't Do what the User Does in the way needed to give Boden meaningful business metrics of how their website performance impacts online sales.

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