How online retailers handle site performance - and the customer experience

[mandy]

Rich media functions, hosted services, content served up by third parties, even content posted on sites by customers themselves all are new opportunities for e-retailers to differentiate themselves from the competition and keep customers engaged. Poorly executed, however, they also represent more opportunities for site performance to falter.

That means retailers that incorporate such bells and whistles are in a balancing act: keep up with the Joneses—bypass them, if possible—but ensure what is being offered to shoppers in site features and functionality is delivered in a way that keeps shoppers satisfied and doesn’t slow down the site or its applications. And that’s a promise that must hold up no matter where customers are accessing the site from and no matter what kind of equipment they’re using.

Given the tremendous variety in technology that connects online retailers with consumers, that’s a tall order—one that retail I.T. operations struggle with daily. To handle it all as sites grow more complex, online retailers are taking a multi-pronged approach. They’re using technology that pushes some site applications out to a shopper’s browser and looking to outside content servers to ease the load on their own servers. And they’re committing to a new kind of performance monitoring and testing that goes beyond the basics of load times and page availability to reach deeper into an end-user’s experience...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=22233