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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 her 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.

Posted at 09:07 AM in eCommerce Strategy | Permalink