With the holiday season near, all the e-commerce planet is buzzing with preparations with already 73% of the online retailers in the starting blocks. Stocks, discounts and communication are checked to be sure that nothing is amiss. In the backend, many checks are done to ensure the quality of the online experience for the visitors and the global performance. That’s where load testing takes place.
Performance can have great impact on your business, and business there will be this year!
Always more and more online shoppers
Last year was record-breaking for e-commerce. With physical stores closed and lockdowns everywhere around the world, the shopping was mostly done online. With fast solutions like Amazon, it is so easy to stay at home and wait for the goods to be delivered.
If we want to go further, that trend can apply to every sector on the Internet. The early days of COVID created a surge of traffic in France and United Kingdom from 20 to 30%. And that was only an acceleration. Internet access is made easier by the day, making global performance an everyday problem for some websites, and traffic peaks very critical moments to handle.
E-commerce is directly related to performance
It may be an obvious guess for a lot of people, but figures actually supports that idea, coming from the most renowned websites. Yes, your online shopping experience can be a pain which repel people from buying. And that can be to the extreme!
In the 2000s, Amazon found that a 100ms delay could cost 1% in Sales. The same goes for Google which
managed to directly link latency with bounce rate. Today, studies like the one from Perdot or Akamai show that the latency impact the conversion, up to 7%. 1% sales or 7% in conversion rate, depending of your business size, your sector and your target, the final figures can amount to a lot of money loss that could be avoided by preparing in due time.
This is also an answer from the customers. MarketingBulldogs noticed that 79% of customers who had a bad online experience on a website are less likely to come back.
Long story short, a bad performance can impact the number of your sales and conversion rate overall, as well as your retention rate. Your website is your shop but you won’t be here everytime to clean everything during the busiest period of the year.
How to prepare?
Being ready for the e-commerce high season is a matter of anticipation. People are not interested in Black Friday only when it’s here. The trend starts well before. So do your communication, your logistic process and everything related to that.
The right timing is about right now. While you build your holiday season online environment, be sure to take some time to load test. The earlier the better when it comes to testing.
Of course, Gatling can help you! Magento, shopify, BigCommerce or Opencart, the Galting solution can be used with the most common e-commerce solutions. To help you with that, we gathered all our resources related to load testing and e-commerce so you can be ready in time! You can also find our use case with a summary of the impact of load testing and performance for e-commerce.
