One of the nice things in my job, is I get days out of the office spending time with some cool eCommerce guys who have to manage some big and interesting sites, planning some innovative and interesting website testing and monitoring.

Even more interesting is sharing a speaking engagement with people we’ve worked with, and hearing what they are willing to say in public about the web performance projects we’ve shared!

Luke Fairless at Tesco.com is one of those guys. He juggles keeping the world’s biggest grocery site running, with a continual stack of projects to add functionality for customers.

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.