Are performance issues the bane of eCommerce sites?

January 22, 2014 Written by NetSphere Category: Websphere Commerce

A recent survey conducted by Load Impact, a company that produces a cloud-based, on-demand load testing tool, revealed that eCommerce sites “are some of the worst performing as a category even though availability and performance directly impact their bottom line.” For those in the eCommerce business, the statement is sure to cut to the quick, but at the same time, it should also be a statement that will inspire positive changes in the community.

The survey’s findings, which don’t just target eCommerce sites, were delivered in a report titled the State of Web Readiness. No matter the website category, some of the results were quite eye-opening. For example, from the data collected from more than 5,000 performance tests and from the surveys of more than 500 Load Impact users, 68 percent of respondents said they'd experienced website performance or stability problems in the past year.

For any type of website, performance issues can include slow-to-load pages and an incapacity for handling high volumes of traffic. For e-retail respondents, 39 percent claimed that they lost money because of performance and stability problems. That’s compared to only 24 percent of the non-retail respondents that indicated the same. According to Load Impact, the propensity for performance issues within eCommerce sites are the result of:

Rapid growth in eCommerce traffic, which means that reality outstrips projections; and the sites have no reliable means of tracking this.
eCommerce that requires more complex, dynamic, user-generated content – and latency-inducing back-end calls – than other types of websites.
eCommerce websites that may simply have a higher awareness of these issues since performance failures directly impact sales statistics.

Regardless of the reasoning, eCommerce businesses must improve the way that their sites perform. To do so, ongoing testing should be incorporated into regular site maintenance activities. Testing shouldn’t be something that only happens right before a site goes live; it should be the logical next step whenever changes are made to a site.

In addition to regular testing, the eCommerce platform itself can have a big effect on how well a site functions. According to Gartner, IBM’s WebSphere Commerce is a highly scalable product that when administered properly can help an online retailer get over the hurdles of poor performance. It goes without saying that the robust characteristics of WebSphere Commerce are only possible when the platform is properly managed, configured and customized.

For high levels of traffic that cause some sites to crash, WebSphere Commerce is well equipped to avoid these situations. One advantage that WebSphere Commerce has over other comparable platforms is that it's based on the WebSphere Application Server (WAS) software, which IBM has invested a great deal of effort into optimizing for highly clustered environments.

For slow-to-load pages, there are a few quick fixes that can be implemented today. Those include pruning the number of website plugins that are installed and compressing large photos that could be bogging a site down. Before and after, site owners can use the free WebPageTest tool that measures page load times.

For persistent performance issues, contact the team at NetSphere Strategies. Our staff are certified in WebSphere Commerce and are skilled at pinpointing the issues that could be costing your company money right now.

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Abbe Miller is the marketing manager at NetSphere Strategies, located just outside Chicago. NetSphere Strategies is a boutique eCommerce company positioned to help businesses transform their online presence by providing a full complement of services that starts with our strategic consulting and creative design teams, then continues with building innovative solutions and providing ongoing post-project support.

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