The Best Retail Website – how to build it and measure it

Posted on January 20, 2012 by deri

As retailers make up a good part of the projects we’re busy with the question of to “how to build the best retail website” sometimes comes up.

Which is a great question, and one that everyone in eCommerce should be asking, but even more interesting is when a  Director level person poses the question:

“How do I build and manage a TEAM, to build the Best Retail Website ?”

Because it shows a much deeper, more sophisticated, understanding of the evoloution of online retail: technology can do great things – but it needs great people to achieve that.

Some retailers I meet are engaged on a fast track growth in their online operations:  either newer companies for whom online has always been the greater part of the business, or household names who are ramping up online strategically. Continue reading →

Posted in Do what the Customer Does, Lost Sales monitoring, Missing Product Monitoring | Comments Off

Google Page Speed doesn’t make your website faster for users!

Posted on January 20, 2012 by deri

Following on from my last blog on the The Fallacy Of One-Page Website Performance Optimisation   I just wanted to add a quick note in answer to the question: “My web tech team are using lots of cool page speed performance tools to make our pages faster, isn’t that enough?”

I wrote earlier this week how thinking ‘page’ is not as effective as thinking ‘Journey’ – but putting that to one side  – in particular I was asked about Google’s Page Speed tool.

It’s a useful tool, I’m not knocking it, but I am saying that it’s scope and limitations need to be understood. You can entirely waste precious tech team resources if you don’t. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Performance Monitoring, Browser monitoring, Do what the Customer Does, Uncategorized, User Journey Monitoring, Website Monitoring, WPO | Comments Off

The Fallacy Of One-Page Website Performance Optimisation

Posted on January 16, 2012 by deri

I get to sit in on a lot of meetings with clients, who are looking to improve the ROI of their websites.

The most interesting ones are with organisations that have evolved far enough along the eCommerce evolutionary path to realise that it’s no good IT and Business teams sitting in separate silos. Those that understand that all teams need to pull together to achieve better online sales for their company, that their functions are interdependent and that it is through focusing on continually improving the technology underpinning the user experience that they will achieve their biggest success.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ajax Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring, Do what the Customer Does, Online Mystery Shopper, User Journey Monitoring, Website Monitoring, Website Performance Monitoring, WPM, WPO | Comments Off

Load Testing MCR Retail websites – Realism and accuracy

Posted on December 15, 2011 by deri

The team here have been very busy the last quarter, as always, a lot of retailers want to load test their websites in advance of the seasonal shopping rush, and this year it seems that the benefit of this preperation is being recognised more widely than ever.

I’ve been very impressed with the team here, how they’ve been able to juggle such a busy period whilst at the same continue development of our testing systems, to allow us to model even better realism for our multi-channel retail projects.

There’s been some fascinating graphics of realism too, as we’ve evolved our approaches.

Continue reading →

Posted in Application Performance Monitoring, Cloud Website Testing, Website Capacity Planning, Website Load Testing, WPO | Comments Off

Give your customers some love, website monitoring TLC

Posted on November 28, 2011 by deri

A major milestone was reached for SciVisum today.

A B2C website client, Inghams Travel, has been so impressed with our Dynamic User Journey monitor service over the last year and more, that they decided to put up our logo on their website footer, to let their customers know their experience online is important. Continue reading →

Posted in Inventory Monitoring, Missing Product Monitoring, User Journey Monitoring, Website Monitoring | Comments Off

Monitoring Shared-eCommerce Platform MultiChannel User Experience

Posted on October 25, 2011 by deri

We have been involved in some interesting User Journey monitoring projects recently, for a couple of retailers trying to cover the full multi-channel user experience.

To achieve full multi-channel understanding measurement of dynamic User Journeys on the public website have been complemented with Journeys on the internal  in-store  shopping Kiosks and ePos systems as well as with Mobile User Journeys on the m-web mobile website.

But things are more tricky for clients on shared eCommerce platforms – the likes of Fresca,  Venda, IBM WebSphere and so on – that make it tricky to be sure your website will be ready for big traffic peaks.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

QA is not software testing: Quality is your Users Experience

Posted on October 11, 2011 by deri

It was an interesting day out Thursday at the Iqnite London QA and Software Testing Conference 2011.  An opportunity to bump into some known names in the QA space like Shane Kelly (QMF fame), who’s at our client William Hill, as well as to meet and network with new folk, and share the platform with old friends like Den from Dixons Stores.

The panel ran an interesting group session after lunch, involving a bit more energy as people moved round the room to reflect where they saw themselves on the continuum from being pure QA folk, or pure software Testing, or a bit of both. More of that later. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Performance Monitoring, Cloud Website Testing, Uncategorized, User Journey Testing, Website Monitoring, Website Performance Monitoring, WPM | Comments Off

Website monitoring support – clients rave about SciVisum support team

Posted on September 23, 2011 by deri

It’s been a  busy month, with a number of new clients coming on board who have upgraded from other suppliers’ traditional, basic services to our more sophisticated approach to website monitoring:  ‘Do what the Customer Does – No really – Do What They do , not a simplified series of static page hits‘.

But this week two specific instances really prove just how important that appraoch to monitoring methodolgy really is.  In fact, now that I think of it there are actually three instances if you count our remarkable Microsoft Azure performance testing results.*

Continue reading →

Posted in Application Performance Monitoring, Cloud Website Testing, User Journey Monitoring, Website Performance Monitoring, WPM, WPO | Comments Off

Why SciVisum Is Like The Matrix – The Eureka Moment

Posted on August 23, 2011 by deri

Is it a question of the known unknowns, or the unknown unknowns?

When talking to organisations about what SciVisum does, and what makes us different, we are always keen to get a live trial of our monitoring suite or testing services running on their own sites, using their own data.

Proof of Value as it’s sometimes called. Show, not tell, if you prefer. We can tell you how it works, and what it does, and why and how it does it, but in the end it’s like the Matrix. To misquote Morpheus “No one can tell you what what SciVisum does, you have to see it for yourself.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Inventory Monitoring, User Journey Monitoring, Website Monitoring, Website Performance Monitoring, WPM | Comments Off

Christmas eCommerce planning – Checking It Twice or losing it!

Posted on August 15, 2011 by deri

It’s that confusing time of year when the sun is shining outside the window, but the big projects on the go are Christmas ones!

It’s a no-brainer ROI wise, that eCommerce retail sites need to prepare for the Christmas rush, there is simply such a high value of sales at stake for most players.

Getting the IT eCommerce technology ready is therefore a common activity – but sometimes we see Load Test planning activity that is missing the boat – especially if the business teams have rather left the IT teams to it, and to have not provided helpful targets as to what is required.

Continue reading →

Posted in Website Capacity Planning, Website Load Testing | Comments Off