It’s not too late to maximise online Christmas revenues

November 16, 2010

Expert in the field of web application performance and load testing, Graham Parsons points out that, as budget cuts continue and with Christmas now only weeks away, the pressure is on for retailers

The challenge is how to grow, or at least maintain, revenues as the tightening of consumer belts threatens to result in reduced spending over the busiest annual shopping period.

There is however some good news, according to co-founder and chief executive of Reflective Solutions, Graham Parsons; despite the continued decline in consumer confidence, online spending seems to be growing exponentially. He highlighted that Capgemini reported only recently that an estimated £6.4 billion will be spent online this December in the UK alone.

“With Cyber Monday – the first Monday in December and traditionally the busiest internet shopping day of the year – fast approaching, retailers need to ensure that their e-commerce sites are reliable and robust enough to stand the hoards’ of impending online Christmas shoppers, if they want to secure a slice of this spend,” he said.

Parsons added that a second bit of good news is that it’s still not too late for retailers to performance test their websites, thanks to a new breed of scriptless performance testing software.

The importance of performance testing

“Performance testing is essential to ensure that websites perform optimally when exposed to heavy traffic loads,” explained Parsons. “The failure of a website under stress can result in the site crashing, slowing down or sending error messages to users; all undesirable outcomes for retailers aiming to maximise e-commerce revenue over Christmas and generate repeat business from loyal customers. Performance is also linked to Google rankings; website response is seen by Google as being so critical to user experience that it has now started to include the speed of response as a factor when rating sites in search results.

“Traditional application testing tools rely on specialists to develop test scripts for assessing a web application’s scalability; until now there has been no alternative. Subsequently, the traditional process of performance testing is known to be expensive, complex and time-consuming. The reason that so many websites fail, despite being ‘tested’ by traditional performance testing tools, is because of time pressures on the testing window – most commonly caused by development overruns.”

He continued: “Testing teams do not have the weeks required to develop and implement test scripts needed to ensure full and accurate testing. Corners are cut and poor quality testing - which does not closely simulate the user experience or retail environment – is undertaken. The result can be that a website which has been tested at a very low load (for example 50 simultaneous users) falls over when that load increases (for example, to 100 users) in the real user environment, or fails to meet customer performance expectations.”

Scriptless testing increases retail flexibility

Parsons said new scriptless testing tools are revolutionising website performance testing for retailers. “These tools do not require expensive specialist consultants to spend weeks developing test scripts; instead they provide simple wizards and online instructional training videos to intuitively guide those with no testing experience through the process.

“As a result, a website’s performance can now be tested in a matter of days, rather than weeks. Critical performance defects can be identified and resolved much quicker than ever before, with the additional advantage that the total cost of testing is also dramatically reduced, as the services of specialist testing professionals are not required. To cap it all, the time and cost savings, coupled with a much simpler approach, do not come at the expense of quality testing. The new generation of scriptless testing tools is capable of producing ‘correct’ test results which simulate the real user environment as accurately as the more complex and time consuming traditional testing tools on the market,” he added.

Parson concluded: “The key impact on retailers in the run up to Christmas is that correct performance testing can still be undertaken throughout the run up to this key trading season if necessary, to ensure that their websites are fully optimised and prepared for the Christmas shopping onslaught in December. This increased flexibility allows retailers to be more reactive to market conditions and better able to accurately predict expected traffic. Ultimately, retailers who fully optimise the performance of their e-commerce channels ahead of the busiest annual online shopping period will no doubt have a very merry Christmas; the results of which will be reflected by a healthy bottom line.”

Reflective Solutions is the UK-based development company behind StressTester, a scriptless performance tool used by some of the world’s busiest ecommerce businesses.