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Ecommerce marketers are a fickle bunch. We talk about our customers in terms of website visitors. Browsing through the store is page views, leaving without buying is abandonment. Never before has a mode of sales been as measurable as ecommerce. As most marketers well know, these metrics are incredibly valuable indicators of the effectiveness of their sites and online brands. The ability for an online marketer to tweak the look and feel of their storefront and directly measure the benefit of doing so is something offline marketers only dream of.  Companies like Omniture do an amazing job of providing ecommerce reporting data.

An equally important, yet often overlooked, class of metrics are the web site usability performance numbers provided by vendors like Gomez , Keynote and Coradiant. Often times, these tools fall into the domain of the IT department and are used to provide reliability and availability metrics concerning the uptime of the site or alerting IT of dead landing pages that result in 404 errors. But these can be equally powerful tools for marketers to study how well their site is suited to their buyers – particularly buyers that don’t happen to be sitting in the marketer’s very own office (as most, oddly enough, are not). Many marketers can’t hop on a plane and travel to London to see what the experience of a person from South Kensington using their site is like and then in a blink of an eye travel to Tokyo and see their same storefront from the isles of the Ginza. But tools like Gomez can.

Speed of an ecommerce site is typically not something a marketer worries about – and that’s usually because she’s physically in the same office as the servers running her site. She won’t notice if his company’s web site internet provider is slow as she’s got a direct connection to the storefront. She won’t notice a heavy ‘hero’ image on the home page is making the site slow for a dial-up user as she’s got a snappy fast 100 Mbps connection at her desk. Quality of service is just not something on top of mind for a marketer – how many times have you studied whether there are any JavaScript errors in your site, or broken image links or slow database connections? Tools like Keynote and Gomez will tell you this. And for sheer traffic analysis, tools like Coradiant are hard to beat.

You’ll be amazed what metrics are available to assess not just the sales performance of your site, but also the quality of service of your site. You’ll also be amazed how significant a lift on conversion is possible just by tuning your existing site for the many visitors you get from around the world.

No there hasn’t been some strange temporal anomaly – Christmas is not happening in July this year! But it is the time when ecommerce marketers should begin thinking about Christmas.  Remember last Christmas when your staff struggled to cope with the (very welcomed) deluge of last minute holiday orders?  Remember those late nights with the IT department looking at graphs of server CPU usage? (And asking yourself, “Why am I in this meeting?”!) Well those good times are on their way again and it’s less time now to Christmas 2007 than it was since Christmas 2006.  Are you ready?

A successful online holiday shopping season begins with plenty of early planning and prep work.  Think for a moment about how many orders you processed last holiday season?  And I’m not talking about orders for the month of November and December as a whole; I mean your busiest week before the holidays – how busy was it?  Factor normal year over year growth and hopefully the added increase from your successful marketing campaigns to drive more traffic to your site and you could be looking at 10-25% more orders this year. I bet you’re remembering that CPU usage graph now!  This year, will your shoppers be greeted with a well performing site with plenty of inventory and a seamless order process, or are things a little less certain in your mind?

So what can you do to get ready?  First, plan.  Estimate your peak hourly, weekly and monthly order and site visitor numbers for the holiday season.  Talk with your IT team or ecommerce vendor now to be sure they are ready for you.  Work with your supply chain vendors or fulfillment locations to make sure they know your holiday order forecasts and can plan for the additional processing. 

Second, that new whiz-bang dynamic-personalization, recommendation engine, user generated, web 2.0 widget you’re planning on adding to your site this year better be ready well in advance of the holidays.  Most companies “black out” the holidays for major IT work – and for good reason.  The last thing you want to do two weeks before Christmas is roll out a new feature on your site that causes instability.  It’s no sense having the latest buzz word trend in ecommerce on your site if basic shopping suffers. 

And finally, think about your customers and their shopping experience in that frantic pre-Christmas rush.  Make sure you provide them with the right offers and products and gift solutions and let them know key shipping dates and order terms so that they have the right information early enough to make informed buying decisions.

Here at Truition it’s Christmas in July for us.  We’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks planning our holiday season strategies.  Surviving your own successful holiday online shopping season is incredibly difficult – doing it for more than 100 of the world’s leading ecommerce sites takes a lot of skill and planning. But thankfully, we’ve got a great team here who can’t wait for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

On Saturday June 30th, a small group of Truites (Truition Employees) embarked on a mission that would bring any normal human to their knees.  This journey brought the team in and out of small towns, through wilderness heavily populated by wild sylvilagus floridanus, and treacherous roads.  This small, but formidable team, road 820 kilometers.

Now let me fill in the gaps...  This team, lead and organized by Bruce Waters, road a combined total of 820kms.  Bruce contributed 420kms - four hundred and twenty kilometers - HIMSELF.  While Bruce planned on sleeping early Friday night at a hotel in preparation for an early start, he forgot to consider that most people consider his 1am start time to be a part of Friday night, not Saturday morning.  Lets just say Bruce didn't get much sleep.

When Luigi arrived at 5am, Bruce had already put about 150kms on his bike.  He was making good time despite the lack of sleep.  The two of them put on a few kilometers before the rest of us were supposed to arrive at 6:45am.

Matthew arrived around 6:30am and was ready to ride.  I dragged myself in at 7:01am, to find everyone on their bikes riding around in the parking lot waiting for me.  I yelled out the window, told them that the road was for cars, unpacked my stuff and we were off about 3 minutes later.

Viliam caught up to us about 45 minutes into our ride.  He turned out to be a critical member of the team.  About 30 minutes later, while Bruce was pacing us at 27km/hr into the wind (note - 33km/hr on both Luigi and my computers), his tire burst.  While I hate to say it, I was relieved - my heart rate was out of control, my legs were burning, it was only a matter of time before I fell off my bike.  Anyways, Viliam changed the tube and assessed the tire.  It looked rough, but would get us back to the hotel were Bruce had a cache of spare parts and tools.

When we got back to the hotel and properly pumped up the tire, it was clearly not going to work - the tube was sticking out through a hole in the tire.  This is where Viliam saved the day - he taped the inside of the tire to keep the tube in.  It held for another few hundred kilometers.  Aside from being a one man support team, he personally contributed 89kms to the cause.

As noted in previous rides, this is where things get blurry. 

At the end of it all, Bruce burst one more tire about 6km from the hotel with no spare.  After unsuccessfully trying to hitch a ride, he rode on the rim back to the hotel, swapped his back wheel with Luigi's and finished the full 420kms.  Unbelievable effort Bruce.

Luigi contributed 200kms, beating his previous best by 94kms - which he clocked for the first time a few weeks earlier.  Luigi is a machine. Apparently this was all possible because of 4 bowls of pasta the night before, and pasta for breakfast.  Mental note - pasta is okay for breakfast.

Matthew contributed 63kms.  What was significant about his ride was the fact that he rode the last 3 of those kilometers with no hands while chatting with Bruce.  Or at least it seemed that way when I saw him do it.

I added a personal high of 53kms, beating my previous best by 16kms - ya, it's my second distance ride ever, and on a mountain bike no less.  Though Matthew made this feel like much less of an accomplishment when he did that 'no hands' thing on his mountain bike.  I'll be sure to blow his doors off the next time we're on the ice.

The team goal was 900kms, but we were short 2 riders, and Luigi picked up most of the slack.  So it was a complete success.  However, Tuesday morning when most of the staff wandered all bleary-eyed into the office, a few of us were limping.  Apparently my knees were meant for sitting.

We also managed to raise $705 dollars for reBOOT, a non-profit organization that refurbishes used IT equipment to charities, non-profits and local communities.  After speaking to Rich Roxborough, the Executive Director of reBOOT Canada, you realize how important it is to re-purpose or properly dispose of old hardware.  If you recently upgraded hardware, PLEASE donate your old equipment rather than storing it in the basement until it is completely useless.  :)

Congratulations on a successful event Bruce!  It was great to be a part of it.