It’s funny how things connect, and serendipitous outcomes result.
Tesco are not in the travel sector: but our website Load testing team completed another project last week for them: and in wash-up discussions afterwards we drifted into the growing power of our inventory monitoring services : and I was reminded of the discussions we had here in the past that kicked the concept off.
Back to the supermarket website some years ago: where we found an interesting, and costly bug. Continue reading
A colleague draw my attention to this BBC news item today, which quotes an “online entrepreneur” saying “millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week” in online retail due to the issue he raises (more on that later).
I hope that readers of that BBC piece aren’t tempted to call their online colleagues and suggest there’s a new trick to help increase online sales because they will be disappointed. The article is very low on evidence, and as the sites it names seem to be connected to the company of the “online entrepreneur” there’s a question is to whether the whole piece is just a successful bit of PR cooked up to promote the name of a new online store for women’s tights.
All too often though, when talking to new clients about their web performance, aspirations and activity to date, I do hear of time and money being spent on ideas that whilst not wrong as such, aren’t supported by evidence form the actual website in question. The most common end result is that well intentioned effort has produced a poor ROI in terms of any change to online sales.
The BBC article quotes Mr Dunstone saying that online retailers can double their sales by addressing ‘simple spelling mistakes’, based on the evidence of… just one website, and one that is linked to Mr Dunstone. Humm. That is not evidence – and anyone rushing to spend time and money based on it risks seeing very little return for their efforts.
But it doesn’t have to be that way – it doesn’t have to be tricky to get the right evidence for your specific site and to ensure you maximise the time and money spent on your online store for a couple of good reasons…
I’ve been to a few awards dinners in my time, and even been short listed for an accolade: just a few months back in 2011 we were short-listed and received a Highly Commended from eConsultancy.com in the Innovation in E-commerce category.
But it was a great feeling last night at Dartmouth House, London at the TechMedia award ceremony to be top of the winners board, and stand up and collect the award for Best Cloud Product category, for our work on the SciVisum iPhone Application Monitor, and we’re top of the 2011 TechWorld Award winners web page too!
And great to hear Techworld editor Mike Simons praise what our team had achieved, saying, “A cloud based tool that monitors 24/7 mobile users’ experience of a website is the right technology for the right issue, right now”.
I’m just back from a very interesting day, at the inaugural mGaming Summit in London yesterday – where I shared the speaking platform alongside key folks from Ladbrokes, BlueSquare, PaddyPower and all the online gaming names.
Some interesting discussions on how to monitor what users do on your site.
There was a very surprising consensus about where the future is going - from discussions comparing the pros and cons of running Apps for smart phones, versus making the m-web experience better for website visitors using mobile devices. But a future that bodes well for online user experience.
Aka: Do what the Customer Does – not an artificial simplification of it.
If you want to know WHY users do what they do on your site: web analytics can tell you the What: but only by seeing what the user experience is like 24/7 as they actually ‘do what users do’ – can you find out if their behaviour is impacted by slow downs at busy periods in certain parts of the user journeys: or by pages with unexpected or wrong content shown.
It’s common for organisations to collect lots of data (if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it: is how the mantra goes).
And data on the live website is no exception: with the advent of the web and web analytics over the last 10 years; there are a huge amount of numbers derived from users hitting pages on your website. Marketing folks have become much more analytical and numeric; and spreadsheet ROI driven.
But not all data is of equal value in driving your online business forward.
So it was a nice quick win for a project this month – when the client realised that they’d been monitoring lots of stuff on the website: but had been missing all along the experience of their actual users: and thus were quickly able to find and fix some glitches that had been hurting their online brand and sales, for some time – ROI was a 2 % drop in abandoned carts.
One of the nice things in my job, is I get days out of the office spending time with some cool eCommerce guys who have to manage some big and interesting sites, planning some innovative and interesting website testing and monitoring.
Even more interesting is sharing a speaking engagement with people we’ve worked with, and hearing what they are willing to say in public about the web performance projects we’ve shared!
Luke Fairless at Tesco.com is one of those guys. He juggles keeping the world’s biggest grocery site running, with a continual stack of projects to add functionality for customers.
We spoke together at Internet Retail Expo in March, and the videos of the day have just gone live – click on “Luke and Deri: Tesco and SciVisum’ at the video page.
Luke raises a number of great points in his presentation on how to do website load testing. Taking just four: Continue reading
We’ve seen a definite step up in the number of clients using video to engage with their visitors. Some are doing simple stuff, just a couple of videos, and keeping it to a simple download before viewing delivery model.
But the increasing number who are using third party CDN suppliers to provide the video streaming, are finding that once the user journey based monitoring is applied, that some CDN’s are providing quite different value for money: and quite different levels of problems to users. Continue reading
The bugs in the travel websites test we did this week, produced some nice screenshot examples of how not to treat your users.
As we always do when setting up website monitoring for a an ecommerce travel website, we set up a few User Journeys, some 7 or 8 page long, to reproduce the process of finding a holiday.Various flows including searching, and choosing at random from the packages offered; as well as some that went straight to the special offers with a minimum of searching.
What we spotted within 24 hours of running these user journeys: Continue reading
(This article by Deri Jones was first published in Internet Retailing magazine.)
Online shopping tends to revolve around helping visitors find and put things into the Basket: in order to reach the overall goal of having them Check Out and buy. But there are a number of areas where the overlap between the Business Teams’ specification of Basket features, and the limitations of technical implementations, mean that online shoppers can be left in a state of rage, frustrated that they can’t get the site to do what they want. Continue reading
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