PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--eTail East, Booth 31 – SOASTA, the leader in cloud and mobile testing and real user monitoring, today revealed the Perform At Your Peak, Holiday 2014 Performance Training Guide which provides crucial insights on how retailers can prepare and monitor consumer activity in real-time on their mobile and web e-commerce sites to optimize user experience and conversion. Ten of the top 10 online retailers in the U.S. rely on SOASTA’s mobile and web technology to ensure flawless mobile and web performance under the busiest traffic conditions, so SOASTA is uniquely positioned to provide guidance on the upcoming holiday shopping season.
“Holiday shopping is the most important time of the year for e-commerce retailers globally, and with substantial consumer adoption of mobile and online shopping, retailers must deliver a flawless experience to their customers,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. “Just a one second delay could cause an e-commerce site generating $10,000 in daily sales to lose $250,000 annually. Delays and downtime during the holiday season could seriously impact revenue.
“Now is the time for retailers to get ready for the biggest online traffic day of the year, Cyber Monday. We have laid out our tips on when and what retailers need to do to prepare for traffic spikes and monitor real user behavior so that they’re fully prepared for the busy holiday season.”
In fact, SOASTA found that 40 percent of shoppers will abandon a website if it takes over three seconds to load. A full 80 percent of consumers who have a dissatisfying experience with a retailer’s website performance are much less likely to return to the site to make another purchase afterward. With so much at stake, retailers need to prepare in advance for the spikes in customer traffic and purchases that come with the holiday season.
SOASTA’s top five essential performance tips for retailers getting ready for 2014 holiday shopping season include:
- Plan in the New Year: Analysis of the previous holiday season sets the baseline for planning. Identify your peak periods of traffic, down to the minute if possible, and determine the cost of performance delays on your business, so you know where to focus your optimization.
- Infrastructure and Application, Start in Spring: Preparation should include assessing the current infrastructure, securing the environment, and tuning the app and/or website.
- Monitor, Continuously: Retailers should include the measurement and analysis of the application’s overall performance, traffic levels, end-user experience, and upstream connections including payment gateway, shipping and fulfillment needs to ensure functionality.
- Load Test, Continuously: Load testing should include testing for spikes with the cloud, testing overlooked items, and load testing centered around measuring, testing and complete end-to-end system.
- Marketing, Start in Fall: Marketing efforts should include effective campaign management to remain connected with stakeholders and put into place policies to govern changes made to the existing campaign plan, email best practices, and promotions and discounts.
SOASTA’s products enable enterprises to take advantage of real-time data, gaining deep insights into their customer’s experience and resulting behavior. Additionally, the company’s solution, CloudTest, is used by 10 of the top 10 retailers in the U.S. for seasonal readiness testing to prepare for holiday shopping.
At this year’s eTail East conference, SOASTA executives, Buddy Brewer, VP of Product, and Andrew Custard, VP of Sales, Americas, will be presenting on “User Experience Optimization & Conversion Optimization” at 2:10 pm EDT on Wednesday, August 13.
For more information, visit www.soasta.com/e-commerce.
About SOASTA:
SOASTA is the leader in cloud testing. Its web and mobile test automation and monitoring solutions, CloudTest, TouchTest and mPulse, enable developers, QA professionals and IT operations teams to test and monitor users with unprecedented speed, scale, precision and visibility. The innovative product set streamlines test creation, automates provisioning and execution, and analyzes real user behavior in real-time to deliver actionable intelligence, faster. With SOASTA, companies have confidence that their applications will perform as designed, delivering quality user experiences every time. SOASTA’s customers are many of today’s most successful brands including Avaya, American Girl, Bonobos, Backcountry.com, Chegg, Experian, Gilt Groupe, Hallmark, Intuit, Microsoft and Netflix. SOASTA is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more information about SOASTA, please visit http://www.soasta.com.
SOASTA is a registered trademark of SOASTA, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
