The Gift of Web Performance: Making eCommerce Miracles

It's that special time of year, and we can all feel it. Thanksgiving and the weekend of deals that follow have come and gone, Jack Frost is making his rounds, and everyone is looking forward to that time off at the tail-end of December. For internet retailers, this season brings more than just family time; it brings an increase of purchases as many consumers shop for their loved ones. To complement that warm-cozy feeling of the Holiday season, Blue Triangle wanted to put together a collection of customer success stories for you to read as you warm up by the fireplace and listen to some Michael Buble.

Homepage for the Holidays

During the Holiday Season, those who host festivities are responsible for preparing their home for exchanging gifts and sharing a meal. And like a conscious host preparing for their guests, etailers take extra care to meticulously optimize their home pages and give a warm welcome to their users.  The Home page is the front door for most eCommerce websites; it makes sense to put a heavy focus on the entrance. But for Slickdeals, a Blue Triangle customer, focusing on their Home page would not yield the same results as it may for other retailers.

Slickdeals is the leading crowd-sourced shopping platform on the web. Slickdeals offers limited-time daily deals from top retailers such as Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop.   

Slickdeals was focused on web performance as part of their digital initiative to improve conversions across their site.  Like many online retailers, they assumed improving their front page would yield the best ROI since this is usually where the customer journey begins. However, they were unable to determine the net benefit tied to these planned improvements. 

With the use of Blue Triangle’s Real User Monitoring, they found that improving the speed of their Frontpage (home page) had relatively little impact on the overall conversion of their site. Instead, the collected user data brought them to their Store pages, where Slickdeals features products specific to their many retail partners. These Store pages had a much steeper conversion rate curve, meaning that focusing on web performance on their Store pages would lead to higher revenue opportunities than on their home page.  

By following our advice, Slickdeals made web performance improvements only on their revenue-critical pages. These pointed improvements resulted in Slickdeals realizing millions in untapped online revenue and saved their team weeks of working on projects that would have otherwise delivered inferior results.

Your company can stand to gain similar returns to Slickdeals with an investment in Blue Triangle. So as you deck the halls of your website this season, remember to prepare the pages that matter most in your customer journey  to receive the highest conversion from your internet guests. 

Read more about our Slickdeals case study here. 

Jingle all the Driveway

Winter signals snow for many. And with snow, a clear path is needed to be able to get to and from your home. Just like a blanketed driveway, you need to clean up whatever delays your visitors from first interacting with your website. A customer of ours, U.S. Auto Parts, had a plethora of snow in their driveway. Good thing Blue Triangle was ready with a shovel.

The retailer's Senior Director of Engineering was tasked to improve web performance on 2 of their sites, CarParts.com and Auto Parts Warehouse. However, the company could not calculate how much web performance impacted their online revenue, or which areas of the site had the highest revenue opportunity related to improving web performance. In other words, they didn't know where to start shoveling to create the easiest path.

Blue Triangle identified that the Shopping Cart and Home Pages had the highest revenue opportunity related to improving web performance.

They implemented Blue Triangle's prescriptive recommendations:

• Removed unnecessary third-party content
• Deferred the loading of non-business-critical third-party content
• Optimized back-end code to improve the speed of 2 files

After U.S. Auto Parts hung up their shovel, they saw a 4-second web performance improvement and a corresponding revenue uplift of millions in just 2 months.

Plenty of room at the Inn

One of our customers, a large international hotel chain, had recently acquired another hotel chain of considerable size. And with all mergers, comes the difficulty of integrating the various systems of the respective companies and their eCommerce profiles.

This Hotel chain needed to integrate the accounts of all of the acquired hotel's customer accounts with their own. And the Hotel chain needed to ensure that all traffic from the newly acquired hotel would redirect to their own website as a way of merging the brands.

Luckily, with the help of Blue Triangle, we were able to ensure a seamless integration between the two websites. Using our synthetic monitoring, the hotelier created thousands of multi-step monitors in automated fashion to test redirects and was able to quickly fix any issues. The result? A smooth website merger.

How the Bot Stole Revenue

With winter on our doorstep, many responsible homeowners have taken it upon themselves to prepare their houses for the cold and the harsh weather that follows. And just like your cozy abode, retailers need to adjust their sites for the blizzard of sales that come along with the Holiday Season.

One of our customers, a Home Improvement Retailer, was experiencing a 60% site-wide slowdown for their west coast customers and could not understand what the issue was. That, on top of the growing problem of their Product pages slowing down at an increasing rate, left their development team in a vice of responsibilities. With winter coming around the corner, they sought out a solution.

With page speed being Blue Triangle's bread and butter (or should I say milk and cookies), we were happy to help. After analyzing the retailer's traffic, we noticed that a large portion of their west coast traffic was coming from bots, slowing the website down for all of their real visitors. The estimated lost revenue from the slowdown was $220K a day! We identified the source of these congesting bots, and our customer hastily directed their Content Delivery Network to block them.

As for the product pages that were snowballing in load time, Blue Triangle identified the specific third party tags that were loading too early and slowing down the rest of the page's functions. It was a simple act of tag governance that resulted in a massive improvement for this Home Improvement retailer. The customer saw an increase of $500M in annual revenue.

Now, that's a gift that keeps on giving.

So as you prepare your firm for the next few weeks, and navigate your company through the blizzard of sales that comes along with this time of year, consider putting the gift of Blue Triangle underneath your corporate tree.