News Feature

Online Retailers Get Ready for Holiday Traffic

By Thomas Wailgum

November 15, 2006 — CIO —

E-COMMERCE So online retailers, what’s it going to be this holiday season? Another year panicking from November to January over a possible overload of website traffic? Or are you going to get it right and seize your share of the $457 billion worth of retail sales up for grabs this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation? The stakes are high. According to a recent Harris Interactive survey, 40 percent of online consumers will abandon transactions entirely or turn to competitors upon experiencing problems.

First to-do item: Online retailers should prepare their systems for a 25 percent increase in traffic over last year’s, according to Rajib Das, vice president of business development for SkillNet, a retail industry technology consultancy. SkillNet recommends that online retailers conduct a website performance audit to see if the site can handle going from, say, 100,000 visitors a day to 135,000, and to see if the e-commerce applications and back-end interfaces (CRM, inventory, order management) hold on through the spike.

Next up: Das says that while many of the better retailers measure conversion rates (what percentage of consumers who come to a site actually become a customer), as a practice, it has not reached the vast majority of them. More retailers need to focus on improving their conversion rates, he says.

Because the "act of getting people to your site is a costly affair," Das says, "even if you can do it a little better, it can make a humongous change [in increased revenue]."

Another wrinkle is that while newer customer service technologies are enabling more flexible customer experiences (for example, buy online, pick up in the store), the pressure on the back-end IT systems to get this right is even higher. "In a sense, the website is a faceless operation, so customer service is even more of an important factor," Das says. © 2008 CXO Media Inc.

Comments

Share [+]

TOOLS

Comments

Digg This

SlashDot

CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Infrastructure

» Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention
This report shows the findings of a recent Proofpoint and Forrester Consulting study on e-mail security, data loss prevention, and includes statistics on electronic risks.

» A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security
Learn how Proofpoint delivers a dedicated, hosted e-mail security solution that combines state-of-the-art anti-spam and virus control.

» A Proactive Approach to e-Discovery
Learn about the key e-discovery challenges facing legal and IT departments today and how businesses can develop an e-mail archiving strategy to deal with e-discovery requests.

» The Advantages of Identity Based Encryption
Download this paper to learn why e-mail encyrption is critical to an organization's overall security architecture and the advantages of identity-based encryption.

» Global Best Practices in Email Security, Privacy and Compliance
This whitepaper discusses the latest global regulations that impact the e-mail security policies and strategies of today's enterprises, universities and government organizations.

Center sponsored by