The high cost of slow E-commerce
Posted by Max Robbins on October 27th, 2015A a joint search speed experiment by Google & Microsoft found that a delay of only 400 milliseconds, reduced the daily number of searches by 0.6%. This represents over 600 million in search revenue ,lost for a delay nearly beneath human notice. Surprisingly, that number remained depressed by 0.21%—even after the experiment had finished, due to customers expectation of slower response and proclivity to use different services.
In the world of e-commerce, the comparison shopping website Shopzilla found that optimizing page-loading times led to 25% more page views, a 7 to 12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware expenditures.
There is a clear business value in having faster websites, but for many e-commerce companies, upgrading site infrastructure is a difficult proposition. Traditional strategies require investing in costly new hardware that is inflexible and will eventually become obsolete. Increasing the number of servers, increases technical and administrative costs which can lead to downtime and lost revenue.
Often this is a decision that companies avoid until a site failure occurs, or capacity limits are reached.
There are better options. Web technologies such as aiScaler have made website optimization simpler, more reliable and more flexible.
Online shopping websites are challenging to maintain, with complex background processes, slow SSL security, and sessions spread across multiple servers. The ability to search for products, read and post product reviews, and buy products relies heavily on database rendering of both static and dynamic content.
It is not be surprising that periods of high seasonal (or growth-related) profitability also coincide with most site technical issues. E-commerce websites often experience seasonal swings in holiday traffic that can be many times greater than baseline traffic volumes. Advertising promotions can drive high volume spikes that paralyze service at the worst moments.
Industry research shows that customers who experience poor performance believe that the service and products will also be poor. What this means is that performance affects your brand.
Growing e-commerce websites have traditionally built up server farms to increase their capacity. This approach leads to excess capacity during normal operations while requiring expensive technical administration.
The solutions is environments that can spin up to handle capacity and back down to manage cost. Using virtualized dynamic caching solutions like aiScaler increases the speed, stability, and security of high volume web applications, while reducing cost and technical complexity. Benefits to online customers include not only faster page loading from dynamic caches, but also traffic management, dynamic site acceleration, and DDoS protection.
The rise in customers accessing sites from mobile devices greatly increases the complexity for e-commerce providers. aiMobile presents a single, unified domain to both desktop and mobile users. You can provides reliable device-specific device detection, making sure the right content goes to the right device quickly. This protects e-commerce sites investment in SEO while dramatically improving the quality for the end user.
Setting up a dynamic scaling tier, online businesses are able to simplify development and code complexity. This allows developers to focus on developing new features the drive profit, not spend there time focused on scale
In many respects, aiScaler presents a way for businesses to get more from the servers they already have. By serving content directly from aiScaler, loads on server infrastructure can be dramatically reduced. In one example, an aiScaler customer was able to eliminate 60% of their existing server farm while reducing the time from click to content by 50%.
Finally, the security and analytics features of aiScaler strengthen the operational capabilities of any e-commerce store. For instance, traffic monitoring and alerts can supply real-time diagnostic information that allow you to identify and mitigate issues before they affect site performance.
Finally the PCI compliant reverse proxy functions and denial of service protection allow you to protect sensitive internal information from the public web and to mitigate and end damaging DDoS attacks.