Top eCommerce Challenges – Improving the Customer Experience
With several eCommerce companies as customers, we talk to a lot of execs and operations staff about the intersection of technology and the customer experience. We’ll be talking on tomorrow’s webinar with zulily about uptime and making your online infrastructure bullet proof – don’t miss it.
In today’s post, we’ll profile a few concepts tied to improving the customer experience.
- Increasing site performance. This eCommerce exec noted that user patience is continuing to decline. “We’ve become so entitled as consumers. If the page loads in 4 seconds, fine. Make me wait 5 seconds, and I’m gone.” Fast access to data such as shipping costs are crucial to continuing the engagement.
- Enabling notification. The CTO of this online marketplace focused on “big ticket” items called out the impact that notification is having on conversion rates. Rather than waiting for customers to check in on a given item, this company has focused its recent tech innovation on proactively engaging the customer as status of an item changes. Pushing updated prices, for example, or sending customers info on related items have given a big boost to transactions.
- Targeting data. A serial entrepreneur in the eCommerce space highlighted the challenges of constantly making offers more pertinent to the content a customer is currently browsing. Building systems that can “work through the stacks of data out there and place that targeted ad” is a big priority for multiple eCommerce firms he’s advising. He noted the demand these systems place on having fast and available databases at their core.
Across each of these areas, one consistent requirement came through: constant and fast access to data. In every case, serving the customer well relies on data always being there and delivered quickly.
We’ll cover some thoughts on other infrastructure topics, including the cloud and database maintenance, in the next post in this series.
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