Performance as a driver of e-commerce

E-commerce platforms often have a variety of KPIs. Conversion and turnover are of course measured. And more and more often the NPS and CES are included in the assessment. Because you want to know how customers rate you when it comes to service and convenience. In short, there is no lack of attention to the customer journey - rightly so. What often remains underexposed is whether customers can start that customer journey at all. In other words: how good is the performance of your e-commerce environment?

No lack of measuring instruments. But one type of measurement is done far too little: what is the performance of a website? How many customers have already clicked away to a competitor because your site loads too slowly? How often are affiliates unable to display the offer due to network latency or a server that is temporarily down? How many visitors see the website in a very different way than you intended because their browser is not compatible with the design of your site? In other words: how many visitors and how much turnover do you miss due to poor performance of the web environment?

Lack of attention to performance measurements

It is a subject that receives little attention. Firstly, because it involves complex technical matter that is not very sexy. It is largely hardcore IT that marketers and e-commerce managers have little understanding of. It is the responsibility of the IT department, they say.

The IT department does, of course, measure performance, but not in terms of the customer journey. They measure the various components required to display the website: the availability and performance of the network, the up-time of the servers on which the application runs, the availability of the payment module, et cetera. Then it could be that the individual meters are all green, but that an individual customer still has a bad experience. The numbers say nothing about the end-to-end customer experience.

Because there is so little insight, no one knows how much turnover the organization is losing. As a result, measuring performance never becomes a top priority. That is a missed opportunity. Performance should be one of the most important KPIs. Not only from the customer's point of view, but also because it says a lot about the internal cooperation between the different teams.

Performance measurement provides insight into internal cooperation

When increasing the performance, all aspects of the operation come together, from the underlying infrastructure to the content and everything in between. The better the collaboration between the different teams - infrastructure managers, web builders, content managers - the better the performance. How do content managers need to know what requirements a photo must meet to be suitable for a mobile site if they are never spoken to by their IT colleagues if they use the wrong photo? How do marketers know which content segmentation scripts to use if they don't get feedback on the impact on performance?

Poor performance also determines your Google score

The consequences of poor performance are major. The quality of the site is rated lower by Google, so that your site will also be lower in the search results. Affiliates can sometimes not even take up the offer of your site because of the poor performance. And things like “code-2-text” ratio can also have an impact on search engine optimization and ranking.

Better performance also impacts conversion, NPS and CES

Performance optimization is about rolling up your sleeves and tackling the tricky things. The good news is that a good focus on this often has a positive effect immediately. And you notice that in all KPIs, not just in the performance figures. After all, better findability and faster loading time also have an impact on the customer experience and therefore also on conversion, NPS and CES. Improvement is being achieved at all levels.

Other good news is: most of your competitors are not yet doing this. Because as said, it is still an underexposed theme. So if you are the first to improve performance, this will give you an edge in all marketing channels over your competitors. And that can be just the difference between winning and losing market share.