The Retailer Summer Edition 2022

THE RE TA I L ER

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SUCCESSFUL RETAILERS BUILD FRUSTRATION FREE ENGAGEMENTS WITH THEIR CUSTOMERS

Steve Dennis Director Spike

I t’s all about Page Speed – and if you ain’t fast you’re just frustrating. We have been helping retailers tackle this continual challenge for a long time, and here’s the low down on how to ensure you’re getting it right. By 2022, e-retail revenues are expected to grow to $6.54 trillion, up from $3.53 trillion in 2019. And there are no signs of this growth slowing down. As the public becomesmore accustomed to shopping fromhome, thanks to the cultural shifts brought on byCOVID-19, we can expect to see changes in what they expect from the eCommerce buying experience. • Low speeds of any eCommerce platform can be costly. Here are some of its solid warning signs and subsequent consequences: • Basket abandonment – ‘unexpected costs’ are responsible for 56% of all cart abandonment. It is a % worth pausing on. Or was it the slow site? • Site hits – you’re getting hits but lack of further engagement – this hints at frustrated buyers – check. • Page engagement times are short - users could be closing the page down before it loads – check. • Increased Bounce Rates: A slow loading page triggers the users to bounce back. • Reduced Organic Reach: It is hard for your site to rank if it is taking ages to load. Some Warning Signs we see retailers facing:

Current Market & Best Practice Retailersweworkwithmeasure the keymetrics that impact their bottom line every day and strive to ensure that the ideal customer journey is satisfying and certainly a frustration-free experience. Just a one-second delay in loading time results in: • 16% decrease in customer satisfaction

• 11% fewer page views • 7% loss in conversions However

• The ideal website load time for mobile sites is 1-2 seconds. • 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. • A 2-second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.

Four Top Techniques 1. Start MEASURING – easy!

Business Management author Peter Drucker. Once famously said: “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” and that holds very true for page speed. It sounds an obvious place to start but do you even know what you’re up against? Free checks are a great place to start and there are tons of tools out there. All differ slightly in their approach but essentially give you a line in the sand. One of the easiest places to begin is in Google itself. Hit up https://web.dev/measure/, enter a URL like your home page or a PDP and click RUN AUDIT. Bingo, your first speed metric! 2. FIX the quick wins first… …then create a plan to iterate regularly through the rest Your initial page speed measure will give you a feel for how good (or bad) your client page speed experience is. Of course, you’ll need to monitor more than a one-off, across more pages and at different times of day (see below) but the first step Easywins include:

Run Compression Audits & reduce the size of all images Gzip compression can reduce response sizes by 70%. Enable Browser Caching

With caching enabled your website speed will be faster for returning visitors as they’ve already downloaded the images, style sheets and JavaScript they need. External Content Delivery Network (CDN) are also a common solution.

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