More often than not, the performance problems we see with a company’s web and mobile eCommerce site are due to issues with content supplied by third parties. I am looking at our top tips for getting the best from those relationships.
This year the Grand National was set to be the biggest betting turnover of all time with 71% of the adult British population expected to place a bet and is the equivalent to the volume of total number of bets across the four-day National Hunt Festival as Cheltenham. So exactly how did top horse racing betting sites cope with this unprecedented demand?
Part 1 of our CDN performance blog looked at how Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) can affect website performance. Here in Part 2 we discuss our top tips for avoiding CDN pitfalls.
People have reported widespread problems in trying to buy tickets this week, during the running of the London Olympics, and Graham Charlton’s article “Why is the Olympic ticketing website so bad?” at eConsultancy.com nicely highlighted the user experience problems (credit to Nick Donelly at Usability Hell for first detailing them).
Some phrases and concepts cause a lot of confusion and take up so much time, when planning website performance management projects.
Website ‘Last Mile’ monitoring is one – there are several limitations in practise, and we are finding fewer clients getting value from it within their overall end-user experience monitoring.
I get to sit in on a lot of meetings with clients, who are looking to improve the ROI of their websites.
The most interesting ones are with organisations that have evolved far enough along the eCommerce evolutionary path to realise that it’s no good IT and Business teams sitting in separate silos.
Is it a question of the known unknowns, or the unknown unknowns?
When talking to organisations about what thinkTRIBE does, and what makes us different, we are always keen to get a live trial of our monitoring suite or testing services running on their own sites, using their own data.
Proof of Value as it’s sometimes called. Show, not tell, if you prefer. We can tell you how it works, and what it does, and why and how it does it, but in the end it’s like the Matrix. To misquote Morpheus “No one can tell you what thinkTRIBE does, you have to see it for yourself.”
I’ve been to a few awards dinners in my time, and even been short listed for an accolade: just a few months back in 2011 we were short-listed and received a Highly Commended from eConsultancy.com in the Innovation in E-commerce category.
I’m just back from a very interesting day, at the inaugural mGaming Summit in London yesterday – where I shared the speaking platform alongside key folks from Ladbrokes, BlueSquare, PaddyPower and all the online gaming names.
Some interesting discussions on how to monitor what users do on your site.
We’ve seen a definite step up in the number of clients using video to engage with their visitors. Some are doing simple stuff, just a couple of videos, and keeping it to a simple download before viewing delivery model.
But the increasing number who are using third party CDN suppliers to provide the video streaming, are finding that once the user journey based monitoring is applied, that some CDN’s are providing quite different value for money: and quite different levels of problems to users.
The bugs in the travel websites test we did this week, produced some nice screenshot examples of how not to treat your users.
As we always do when setting up website monitoring for a an ecommerce travel website, we set up a few User Journeys, some 7 or 8 page long, to reproduce the process of finding a holiday.Various flows including searching, and choosing at random from the packages offered; as well as some that went straight to the special offers with a minimum of searching.
Looking at the web performance of eCommerce sites, there are some things that make the Holiday sector unique. We work with a number of holiday companies and they have a unique challenge when it comes to accurate website monitoring.
When a holiday season nears its end, holiday companies are often presented with an increasing number of failed ‘user journeys’ that occur when a holiday is found by the visitor but is actually already sold out. And these failed journeys need to be identified and quantified, if they are to enable an accurate reflection of lost sales.
