For any football club, unveiling a new kit marks a significant milestone in the calendar. But amidst the excitement of the launch, how can you ensure that visitors can seamlessly checkout with their coveted new gear? At ThinkTribe, we’re lucky enough to work with some of the Premier League’s most prominent clubs, offering uniquely realistic load testing and dedicated client support to ensure flawless customer experience, even during peak times. Delivering a fast and error-free checkout experience is vital, especially during high-profile events like kit launches. So, how can you elevate your CX when it matters most? To ensure your site can handle high volumes of traffic and concurrent user transactions, accurate customer experience insights under real-world conditions are essential. Here are our top three tips to ensure you’ll be ready to handle the influx of eager fans without a hitch. 1) Prioritise preparation with sufficient time Based on our experience it’s more effective to implement a comprehensive load testing program as part of a planned process in the run up to kit launch. While it may not always be feasible, at the very least aim to conduct load testing prior to code lockdown, allowing enough time to implement, test and fix any issues. It’s important to allow margin for retesting to ensure fixes have worked and evaluate their impact on CX. We recommend testing key journeys at least four weeks ahead of kit launch to evaluate performance of the final system on the live environment. It’s often more costly to make changes at the last minute. 2) Base testing on realistic traffic profiles For the most accurate results, it’s crucial to base your testing on the most realistic traffic profiles . If you’re working with a load testing provider, they should analyse your web analytics and examine historical marketing data to ensure traffic profiles accurately reflect real-world scenarios. 3) Monitor CX around the clock Even minor changes to your site can impact customer experience. To prevent abandonment and ensure a seamless checkout process, continuously monitor key checkout journeys before and during the kit launch. Identifying and resolving issues before they impact your customers is key. If you’re ready to elevate your online customer experience during kit launch find out how thinkTribe can help support your goals. For a more comprehensive guide to maximising online sales at kit launch, download our eBook ‘Preparing your website for kit kaunch success’ . #kitlaunch #peakpreparation

Are you overlooking the hidden obstacles impacting digital experience (DX) and leading to lost sales? Beneath the surface of your digital platform lies a wealth of hidden DX friction, stealthily disrupting your customers’ online journeys. While these obstacles may remain hidden from your view, they have a tangible effect on your conversions. And while they elude conventional monitoring tools and error logs, their impact is keenly felt by your customers, leading to abandonment and lost sales We share our experience of the primary causes of concealed digital CX friction, so you can begin to tackle them and safeguard your bottom line. Understanding Business Logic Challenges Business logic issues serve as a primary source of hidden DX friction, creating frustration and hindering the checkout process for customers. These issues often arise from mishandled product information management (PIM), including complexities in product options, combinations, and stock management. Addressing these issues typically falls within the domain of business teams, so your tech teams are unable to rectify them. Conventional error detection methods fail to identify these issues, leaving customers to navigate through obstacles such as missing prices or unresponsive add-to-cart buttons. The result? Missed sales opportunities and dissatisfied customers. Navigating Intermittent Slowdowns Intermittent slowdowns steadily chip away at conversions and contribute to abandonment rates, yet they often go unnoticed within your online store. These slowdowns stem from complex interactions between underlying technological components and various plugins and tools. Their sporadic nature makes them difficult to pinpoint, manifesting in specific areas of your website, products or baskets or at specific times. Customers encounter these slowdowns while browsing or making purchases, having a direct impact on abandonment. However, traditional monitoring tools may not detect these issues, leaving businesses to grapple with an invisible challenge. Addressing Technical Errors Technical glitches pose a significant barrier to seamless checkout experiences, frustrating customers and eroding trust in your brand. Technical errors can result from bugs in your software or platform, compatibility conflicts, or issues with third-party tools and plugins. These errors manifest as unresponsive buttons, obscured checkout pathways, or confusing error messages. From bugs in your software or platform and compatibility conflicts to issues with third-party tools and plugins, technical errors arise from the complexity of your digital infrastructure. These errors manifest as unresponsive buttons, obscured checkout pathways, or confusing error messages. Such errors disrupt various aspects of your online store, impacting customer journeys and undermining confidence in your platform. Their sporadic occurrence makes them challenging to detect and address effectively. Revealing and Resolving Hidden DX Friction Addressing digital friction requires a shift in DX visibility and monitoring strategies, one that adopts a customer-centric approach and prioritises real-world interactions , on real browsers and using genuine operating systems. Only by interacting with your website as real customers do, and performing the same actions, can you identify and overcome the obstacles leading to abandonment and lost sales. In the dynamic world of digital commerce, the pursuit of frictionless customer experience is ongoing. Are you ready to take steps to mitigate hidden CX friction and reduce abandonment? To learn more about the hidden causes of friction and how to tackle them, read our eBook ‘Uncovering the hidden causes of digital CX friction’. #customerexperience #cxfriction #cxmonitoring

Boden, leading UK online fashion retailer, relies on ThinkTribe’s digital customer experience monitoring to ensure smooth performance and maximise sales across its websites globally. With over 90% of sales coming from online, Boden serves customers across multiple eCommerce stores in the UK, US, Australia, Germany, Austria, France, and a new Eurozone site. The Challenge A team of in-house developers build the company’s websites and key applications, enabling Boden to quickly diagnose and fix issues, which is crucial as their internet business grows. However, the continuous nature of their websites requires 24/7 monitoring to ensure seamless digital experience (DX), especially during their high-traffic end-of-season sales. The Solution Boden uses ThinkTribe to monitor digital CX on their websites 24/7 and alert the team to any issues. ThinkTribe replicates customers performing journeys across the site, identifying digital experience problems in real-time. This proactive approach allows Boden to fix issues promptly, ensuring a seamless shopping experience. Lalit Mandalia, Head of Technical Services, responsible for the smooth running of Boden’s IT infrastructure and networks, explains “We issue new software updates for the websites and associated systems every couple of weeks. When we push out a new release, we monitor ThinkTribe and our other monitoring tools very closely. ThinkTribe is our number one place to look to ensure the websites are OK.” The Benefits David and Lalit highlight ThinkTribe’s comprehensive monitoring and excellent customer service. Historical views and journey comparisons help Boden swiftly track issues and improvements and ensure their websites perform optimally. Discover the full case study here. #digitalexperience #DXmonitoring #globalecommerce

In the fast-paced world of online beauty retail, embracing innovation has always been essential. Technologies like Virtual Reality and AI-driven personalization have fuelled growth, offering immersive experiences and building brand loyalty. While innovation promises enhanced DX and higher conversion rates, increasing the complexity of your digital infrastructure can inadvertently disrupt the digital customer experience, leading to lost sales and brand damage. How technological innovation can undermine Digital Experience (DX) Unbuyable products, unexpected slowdowns, missing prices and images, and checkout errors—each innovation and its interaction with other functionality can introduce friction and drive customers away. Many of these issues are intermittent or occur under specific circumstances, making them difficult to detect. And despite the built-in tools and plugins offered by many digital commerce platforms, smooth implementation isn’t guaranteed, and frictionless DX can remain elusive. Key challenges for online beauty retailers We take a look at some key challenges in beauty digital commerce that could increase DX risk. 1. Immersive, Personalised Experiences Use of AI-driven hyper-personalization and AR/VR provides tailored and immersive experiences. However integration of these tools, compatibility conflicts and interaction with third-parties can exacerbate DX friction, resulting in unbuyable products and unexpected slowdowns. 2. Social Selling & Influencer Partnerships Leveraging social influence and brand communities helps reach new audiences, but integrating third-party or built-in influencer and social selling apps can introduce DX friction including checkout errors and technical glitches. 3. Customer Loyalty programs & subscriptions Implementing loyalty programs and product recommendations involves analysing past purchases and predictive modelling. DX risk comes from configuring these tools and managing product options, combinations, and promotions. Business logic issues can lead to missing product information and stock management problems leading to unbuyable products. 4. Incorporating Social Awareness Addressing socially conscious purchasing including clean beauty, environmental impact, and diversity is critical for beauty buyers. However, showcasing user-generated content and recommended products to support these values introduces new risks to DX. 5. Streamlining the checkout process Providing multiple payment and checkout options have all been shown to increase conversions. Implementation of these options adds a layer of complexity, which, if left unchecked, can result in technical glitches and checkout errors such as obscured checkout pathways and unresponsive buttons. With so many priorities and limited staff resources, how can you address DX friction that could be hurting your conversions? Embrace innovation but remain vigilant DX obstacles remain undetected by conventional tools and error logs and arise unexpectedly – on specific products, baskets or at particular times – making them difficult to detect and address. Real-world DX monitoring is key to identifying and resolving issues before they impact your customers. Performing the same tasks on the same real browsers, native apps, and operating systems as your customers, 24/7, reveals barriers to conversion on your site. And you can save time getting to the bottom of root causes with hard evidence across teams, video replay of issues and fast drill-down to granular data. Plus a service-based solution frees up valuable staff resources to focus on developing your store in line with business objectives. Online beauty retailers must embrace innovation but need to remain vigilant, by monitoring DX 24/7 to ensure a frictionless shopping experience, reduce abandonment, and protect their brand. Learn more about the DX friction that may be hidden from your view and how it impacts conversion rates in our eBook ‘The hidden causes of DX friction’. #digitalexperience #DXfriction #DXmonitoring

In the dynamic world of football eCommerce, digital transformation is revolutionising the way fans interact with their favourite clubs. Today, fans seek engagement beyond the 90-minute matches, craving year-round, seamless Digital Experiences. At thinkTRIBE, we work with Premier League football clubs, providing unparalleled DCX Intelligence. We uncover DCX friction and lost sales and deliver the most accurate DCX insights prior to peak and before and after new feature integrations. From kit launches to online ticket sales and entering new global markets – how can you ensure seamless Digital Customer Experience (DCX)? Enhancing eCommerce profitability through superior Digital CX With ticketing now primarily digital and online merchandise and kit sales becoming a cornerstone of the industry, football clubs must deliver fast, seamless DCX across online stores to enhance profitability. Complex business logic behind ticketing options, membership and loyalty programmes plus kit customisation are a few aspects of Football eCommerce that can introduce DCX friction. Managing exclusive periods, priority points and purchase windows can result in errors such as missing ticket options, missing or incorrect pricing and promotion errors that you may not even be aware of. Football clubs face several challenges with their websites and mobile applications, all posing significant risks to DCX: Coping with traffic peaks Managing inventory and complex loyalty programmes Servicing an increasingly international audience Delivering online kit customisation options Bringing eCommerce in-house Visibility and accountability of third-parties such as autoscaling and payment providers Managing Traffic Peaks planned and unexpected Compared with many industries, we see Football Club peaks are much higher compared to baseline traffic, often resulting in scalability issues – even with autoscaling solutions in place! Managing traffic peaks is challenging, whether anticipated for kit launches, hype drops and streaming of pre-season games or unexpected due to tournament finals, major championship wins, or new signings. For peace of mind that critical routes fans take across your site will manage high volumes of traffic and concurrent user transactions, when it matters most, you need the most accurate Digital CX insights under real-world conditions. Mitigating the risk following site redesign or new features Site redesigns and new features, from kit customisation to new payment functionality, pose a risk to Digital CX and your bottom line. Full Visibility of any Digital CX issues that may be introduced following site changes is essential. Simulating real users interacting with your site at capacity and around the clock, helps uncover user friction swiftly, allowing you to fix issues before they impact your fans and your conversions. The Future of Football eCommerce Optimising Digital CX across new international markets Expansion into international markets has opened up new revenue streams for Football Clubs. However, global retail success requires a seamless international customer experience equivalent to that at home. 24/7 Visibility of all customer-impacting friction is crucial, regardless of country, region or language – including issues arising from multi-currency pricing, CDNs to caching and global transactions. Bringing Football eCommerce in-house The growth of football commerce presents an opportunity for clubs to channel their brands into global eCommerce platforms. Traditionally Football eCommerce operations have been outsourced, but this comes at a financial cost and at the risk of impacting loyalty, by relying on third parties to manage fans’ experience. Whether bringing your eCommerce operation in-house, entering new global markets or adding new functionality such as advanced kit customisation how can you mitigate the risks to Digital CX, your sales and ultimately your brand? Real-world DCX Intelligence mitigates risks to DCX, profit and brand Realistic Load Testing Services are critical for the most accurate DCX insights and to safeguard your brand, during peak periods, site changes or when bringing eCommerce operations in-house. Ongoing 24/7 DCX Visibility is vital to uncover friction and ensure you maintain seamless DCX, maximising conversions around the clock. At thinkTRIBE, we help Premier League Clubs achieve online retail success by helping them deliver superior Digital Customer Experiences. Enabling them to optimise DCX, reduce abandonment and protect brands. By partnering with thinkTRIBE, Football Clubs can not only meet but exceed fan expectations both at peak and 24/7. Let us help you transform your DCX and provide the world-class, fan-centred experience your supporters deserve. Learn more about thinkTRIBE or download our eBook Preparing for Kit Launch Success .

Elevate eCommerce CX & boost Black Friday conversions Black Friday is just around the corner, and with the peak sales period now stretching over a longer period, many deals are set to go live as early as October. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Holiday Season present huge opportunities for eCommerce businesses but failing to prepare adequately can result in lost revenue and long-term damage to your brand’s reputation. The good news is that it’s not too late – by testing now and focusing on delivering optimal Digital CX around the clock, there’s still time to boost conversion rates and prevent lost revenue during this peak holiday period. Seven-Step Plan for Holiday Peak Season Success Follow these steps to eliminate DCX friction and website errors, and maximise online revenue this peak holiday period. 1. Integrate Load Testing Early The earlier you incorporate Load Testing into your holiday season planning process, the better. Many businesses mistakenly leave load testing as a last-minute task, but a more proactive approach ensures you can resolve issues without last-minute pressure. Retesting after fixes is essential for success. 2. Define Realistic Testing Targets Before diving into testing, define what success looks like based on real-world customer experiences. Understand how users interact with your site and build your tests around that knowledge. Use data from past performance to develop realistic test models that simulate actual customer journeys, from landing pages to promotions and checkout – including realistic mixes of journeys and drop-off ratios. 3. Measure Current Capacity Assess your site’s current capacity to handle traffic. Look at how your site performed in previous peak periods, including journey delivery times and error rates. If you plan to launch a stripped-down version of your site for Black Friday, Load Test that version in isolation to understand its performance limits. 4. Test Often We recommend Load Testing months ahead of peak season and using the results to establish a baseline and to identify areas for improvement. Regular testing, with increased frequency leading up to the final code lockdown, will help you make incremental changes and verify improvements. 5. Lockdown Code on Time Start your code lockdown at least six weeks before peak to ensure stability. This timeline allows you to implement final changes, such as Black Friday sections and deal codes, before freezing the code. Consider reducing non-essential functionality to optimise performance and ensure a smooth experience for mobile users. 6. Retest After Code Freeze Two to four weeks before peak season, retest your live system to ensure the final environment is performing as expected. Testing in a staging environment is not enough; real-world performance on the live system is critical for success. 7. Focus on ongoing Customer Experience 24/7 After all the preparation, ensure that your customers continue experiencing a seamless journey from landing page to checkout. Gathering Digital CX Intelligence for key journeys 24/7— especially on mobile — will help you catch any issues before they impact users. Test your site using real-world scenarios to avoid unexpected problems with real browsers and on genuine OS. With this plan in place, you can confidently approach the holiday season, ensuring your eCommerce store is ready to deliver an exceptional Digital Customer Experience, prevent lost revenue and safeguard your brand. Free up staff resources with an extension to your team In reality you probably don’t have the resources, time or capacity to plan, prepare and test for seasonal peaks. A fully-managed service offers the benefits of experienced test experts acting as an extension of your technical team. This expands your resource, time, experience and not to mention test capacity – as and when you require it – and frees up internal teams to focus on business objectives. For a more detailed guide on the seven step process download our eBook here . #digitalexperience #DXfriction #DXmonitoring

How to reveal and streamline the resolution of eCommerce errors In today’s competitive eCommerce environment, customer experience is a key differentiator. Ensuring a smooth and efficient shopping journey is essential to prevent lost sales and maintain the trust your customers have in your brand. Every eCommerce website faces Digital Customer Experience (DCX) friction and website errors — often hidden from your view. These are conversion-damaging issues that remain undetected by conventional monitoring and error logs. While you might be unaware of these obstacles, your customers are not, and their experience—and your revenue—can suffer as a result. Friction examples include visible but “Unbuyable Products”, Product Logic Issues, Missing prices, images & sizes, Technical Errors, Checkout and add-to-bag errors plus Intermittent Slowdowns to name a few. These issues aren’t sitewide or consistent, making them difficult to identify, replicate and resolve. They may only affect certain products, categories, or customer journeys, complicating detection and replication. Additionally, addressing these critical issues often falls outside the remit of your tech teams and instead lies with business or product teams. In this blog, we’ll walk you through a six-step, best practise approach to uncover and address critical DCX friction and website errors that lead to lost revenue. By focusing on these issues, you can enhance your customer experience, safeguard your brand, and ultimately boost your conversion rates. Six steps to uncover and resolve critical eCommerce friction and errors 1. Simulate real customer behaviour 24/7 To uncover critical user friction accurately, you need to simulate real customer behaviour around the clock. Virtual Shoppers dynamically navigating through categories, products, product options and checkout processes, detect more issues, faster. 2. Measure with Real Browsers and genuine OS or Native Apps To detect all potential errors, measure DCX using real browsers on actual operating systems. This approach reveals issues that emulated solutions might miss, such as device-specific rendering quirks, third-party interactions, or browser-specific bugs. 3. Gather and share critical DCX insights to unify teams Unify your business and technical teams around a common point of truth, by sharing critical DCX insights. By highlighting customer-impacting friction through easily digestible data and dashboards, you can ensure that all relevant teams are aligned on resolving the most pressing issues. 4. Verify and prioritise errors by replaying customer journeys Record and replay customer journeys to gain a deeper understanding of errors and their impact. This enables you to quickly verify the severity of issues and prioritise fixes that will have the greatest effect on improving customer experience and conversions. 5. Replicate errors with detailed steps and product data leading to the issue Use video replays combined with dynamic data details and steps leading to an error to replicate it easily. This approach helps you pinpoint the underlying causes, speeding up resolution. 6. Swiftly resolve issues with easy access to granular data Provide your tech team with the evidence needed to resolve errors swiftly. Enable drill down into granular component-level data to diagnose issues, understand root causes, and implement fixes as quickly as possible. Real-world DCX insights with “Digital Secret Shopper Technology” To effectively uncover and eliminate DCX friction and website errors, it’s essential to interact with your site as real customers do—using real browsers and operating systems around the clock. ThinkTribe’s DCX Intelligence Service utilises Digital Secret Shopper Technology to simulate user behaviour, gather critical data on customer experience, and report on issues 24/7. Beyond simply identifying problems, thinkTribe helps you understand their impact through video replays of customer journeys, enabling easy verification and prioritization of errors. With access to detailed data, your tech team can swiftly diagnose and resolve issues, improving your overall customer experience and optimising Conversions. Extend Your Team with Proactive Support Managing DCX friction might seem overwhelming, but with the right tools and proactive support, you can be up and running with a solution like thinkTRIBE’s DCX Intelligence Service within just two weeks. This managed service helps you stay ahead of potential issues, ensuring your customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience every time. For more detail on the Six Steps to reveal and resolve eCommerce friction and website errors download the complete guide here #digitalexperience #DXfriction #DXmonitoring

Essential performance testing features to protect your brand Load testing is capable of delivering valuable data to inform your decisions and protect your customer experience when it matters most. But with the heightened complexity and sophistication of today’s websites, we look at why a traditional load testing approach is no longer up to the job. 1) It’s just too simple! You need real facts for even the most complex site When prioritising spend and making strategic decisions, you need to be in possession of the real facts. With most websites now incorporating complicated business logic, numerous third parties and complex features, load testing is much harder to get right. More traditional load testing approaches along with DIY testing and record and playback methods simply aren’t sophisticated enough to manage new technology resulting in oversimplified testing that masks genuine issues. To ensure your load testing results are rooted in realism you now need a dynamic approach that does exactly what your customers do, testing journeys across your site, making intelligent choices from page content, putting all complex functionality to the test and uncovering issues overlooked using other more simplistic techniques. 2) It’s not realistic enough Gain crucial insights based on real behaviour and realistic data to evaluate performance accurately Users don’t follow one idealised journey or add the same item to their basket time after time so why should your load testing? You need load test engineers to replicate a realistic traffic profile representative of genuine user behaviour you’d expect to see. This includes multi-step journeys, a realistic mix of customer journeys and drop-off ratios – all essential for accurate results. Traditional load testing methodologies rely on measuring simplified metrics. This kind of binary data can provide misleading results and mask important customer impacting issues. Realistic testing provides irrefutable evidence of the customer experience and creates a ‘single point of truth’ for prioritising software and hardware decisions, allocating budgets and more effectively managing third parties. This means you’ll see any and all issues and cover more of your site – including potential bottlenecks – and have the data you need to fix them. Calculating concurrent users is a case in point. It’s a metric often used to measure load but can throw out wildly inaccurate statistics as it doesn’t take into account what users are doing on your site. 3) It’s too time-consuming Take advantage of expert analysis and free up your team A third party that delivers data you can trust as part of a fully managed solution is a low-maintenance option for your tech team. We take clients’ analytics, define a realistic load test model, script journeys, schedule and monitor the testing. By outsourcing this specialist service to a trusted third party, you can gain unique insights into your website’s performance, while saving time, effort and in-house resources that can be more profitably deployed elsewhere. All this plus an external party can provide short lead times when you’re under pressure and greater testing capacity than available from your in-house team. The thinkTRIBE Approach Tribe’s fully managed load testing service  takes your analytics and creates the most realistic load test model and scripts journeys based on the real behaviour of visitors to your site – which means you’ll have speedy access to data you can trust. We script dynamic journeys that incorporate the realism needed to test the most complex of websites including multi-step journeys across a site looking into page content to make dynamic choices. If you’d like tangible, actionable performance testing data, whilst at the same freeing up internal resources contact us to find out more. Read more about our load testing service here or find out about managing a realistic load test programme in our eBook. #websiteperformancetesting #LoadTesting #traditionalloadtesting #performancetesting #webperformance

There comes a time in most websites’ lives, when the only option, in order to meet customer needs and technology demands, is to upgrade your website’s platform. Whether this be after upscaling within your current platform has reached its limit, or you’re wanting to achieve new goals not available on your existing platform, you need to make sure you’re fully prepared to have a seamless and as minimal damage migration as possible. Platform migration can create many opportunities for your business, but what are the risks? Downtime can be a serious problem – the longer your site is down, the longer you’re not making sales, the longer you give your customers to lose faith and search for their products elsewhere. If you don’t plan and carve out a sufficient amount of time to prepare, work on and test a site on a new platform, you are leaving yourself open to a number of glitches and bottlenecks, which you then won’t have time to rectify. This will lead to a poor customer experience when the site is live and could result in prolonged downtime. Loss of customers. This can be easily done when it can be so easily avoided. As discussed above downtime, glitches and bottlenecks can lead previously loyal customers to lose faith in a previously trusted site, or make new customers turn away instantly if achieving their goal takes too long, has too many hoops to jump through or they receive error messages at pivotal stages (such as payment). These issues can be overcome, and the risks to your business removed to achieve a smooth and positive platform migration – this is where thinkTRIBE’s FREE Ten Point Checklist will help: Audit your business processes – which parts of the old system need to be incorporated into the new one – how can processes be modified to make the most of the features of the new platform. Create goals – establish ways of measuring success or failure to better understand your ROI. Devise a timetable – ensure every department is aware of their involvement and goals for the migration and maintain regular meetings to ensure all are on track. Prioritise data and product migration – how will the new platform interface with your existing inventory. Sort out your SEO – ensure your optimisation is transferred appropriately and ensure enough time is allowed for this to be done properly. Allow time for training – Staff will need to get up to speed on the new platform, schedule this in at the beginning Test early and often – Assign a way of testing the new site before it is set live, when it goes live and then regularly to avoid glitches and bottlenecks. Keep your old site – run your old site in parallel until you’re 100% happy with your new site. Maintain customer communication – if any part of your customer service has changed, let them know. Monitor performance throughout – measure your KPIs on your old platform and then on your new, keep this maintained at regular intervals to ensure you can measure the impact of changes. For a more in depth step by step guide to maintain Customer Experience throughout your platform migration project download thinkTRIBE’s eBook!

It’s officially that time of year: the nights are long, and the weather is grim. Halloween might be behind us, the thrills and the scares put to the back of our minds as we move forward into the months of warm fires, hot chocolate, and mince pies. There is still one potential fright ahead of us, though. Before stockings get filled and carrots set out for reindeer, there is one significant date in the calendar, one no online retailer can afford to overlook. Black Friday. No longer confined to the megastores of modern America, the global retail holiday stands as one of the single most significant events in online shopping, and competition is fiercer than ever. Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday set the stage for your Christmas market, for New Year Sales and new launches in the spring. The 2021 market for Black Friday weekend sales is estimated at £4.8 billion. With global spending trends still impacted by the COVID-19 economy, it’s a revenue pie every company is eager to take a slice of. It’s probably a weekend your company has spent months preparing for. The campaigns are designed, your social channels are prepped, the warehouse is raring and ready to go. Your website probably looks excellent, carefully designed to entice loyal customers, and draw in new ones with amazing deals on your products. But what’s happening behind the scenes? It won’t matter how great your offers are if your website isn’t ready to handle the increase in traffic. One minor flaw in web performance risks a frustrated customer, and a frustrated customer might be tempted away by your competitors. If you’re not careful, your fabulous Friday festivities have the potential to become a Fright Fest. With thinkTRIBE’s help, you can put that fear to rest. Our fully managed Web Performance service creates user journeys that are Dynamic in their nature, so rather than following a fixed path they will move across your site exactly as a real customer would. And our Load Testing service creates a real world load model – exposing all bottlenecks and performance issues. thinkTRIBE, therefore, highlights any issues long before they impact your business – giving your teams visibility of your online web performance along with actionable/meaningful data to resolve performance issues. thinkTRIBE can help you manage your customer’s experience to better safeguard your brand values and optimise those Black Friday revenues. Take control of your website, take control of Black Friday, and start the winter ready for anything.

As retailers enter the peak weeks of the Golden Quarter, it’s fair to say that the stakes have never been higher. This year has forced a rapid change of pace for ecommerce operations. Brands with little or no online presence have had to quickly adopt one, while even practised players have redoubled their efforts to anticipate consumer buying patterns and match demand with supply. When it comes to online retail, it’s not just about getting the proposition right. The technological and logistical problems that have been the stumbling block for many – how to deliver a smooth user experience (UX), quickly converting eager browsers into confident buyers, and tying it into a suitably robust, back-end logistics function – are, of course, only exacerbated during peak buying times. Getting it wrong is expensive The basic ecommerce principle of giving customers what they want and ensuring they get it, on any given day of the year, sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it can be a tricky strategy to implement. Take a significant retail occasion – a new product launch or sales event like Black Friday, perhaps– throw a handful of supply issues and a few departmental mixed messages into the equation and you have the potential for significant reputational damage. There’s no shortage of examples demonstrating how even high-profile brands get on the wrong side of a PR spin. Just last month, Smyths Toys found the less-than-sweet spot between supply and demand when a lucrative promotional event turned sour after website glitches prevented customers from placing orders An increasingly competitive landscape Experts predict that this quarter will be a particularly competitive one, with retailers anxiously vying for a slice of a diminishing consumer pot. As Covid-19 takes its toll on the consumer purse, even usually bankable events like Black Friday will exert less overall pull : ecommerce consultancy Wunderman Thompson Commerce has estimated that Black Friday spending could shrink by 22 percent. The bright spark in an otherwise gloomy forecast for engaged ecommerce brands? That online spending is expected to take the lion’s share of business. WTC’s Welcome to the Mega Peak report (a survey of over 2,500 UK consumers) predicts that 67 percent of Black Friday shopping – a potential £3.7bn spend – will take place online. With shoppers harbouring concerns about the financial toll exerted by a toxic combination of the pandemic and January’s Brexit deadline, retailers will need to win every piece of business they can, while they can. Balancing functionality with a flawless UX We know that customers want a smooth browsing and buying experience. But we also know that they appreciate – and, in some cases, expect – the add-ons that enhance the journey. The automated personalisation features offered by our partner PureClarity , enables marketers to deliver precisely targeted campaigns that enrich the UX in a valuable win-win exercise. Delivering these twin ideals – an enriched and smooth customer journey – isn’t antithetical, even when considering performance around peak, so long as realistic testing protocols are factored in from the earliest stages. Simply put, any enhanced functionality – like PCP personalisation – will create an infinitely better UX and help drive conversions but should be used on tandem with a testing regime that ensures there are no obstacles to buying, regardless of traffic spikes. Peak has never been more critical Coming into this pivotal period, it’s essential to understand: The capacity of all digital channels to better analyse how many customers they can support and how many concurrent orders can be processed. How website changes may adversely affect the capacity or stability of the platform. What impact variations in traffic have on site performance and the UX. At what point the site will experience performance degradation and, ultimately, fall over. Test early and often At thinkTRIBE we recommend testing to expose any weaknesses, before making changes and then testing again to make sure your improvements are effective. If you repeat this testing loop, you’ll win more fans and convert more customers, while saving time, money and resources. It’s a strategy that could make all the difference in a pressured market. #peak #performance