The future is ecommerce – and businesses need to check their speed

Richard Wheaton, fifty-five London, discusses the implications for the future of retail – and notes that speed for e-commerce website owners is crucial

The recent quarterly GDP figures were a stark yardstick of the economic impact of coronavirus. The UK has a far larger services sector that many other countries and so, with social distancing, the impact has been greater. As people return to the High Street there are hopes of a bump to the economy but hopefully no further bump to the daily infection rate. Yet, as was recently acknowledged by the CEO of M&S Steve Rowe things would ‘never be the same again’. He commented ‘the trend towards digital has been accelerated and changes to the shape of the high street brought forward.’ Indeed according to data from IMRG Capgemini Online Retail Index online retail sales in the UK jumped by 32.7% year-on-year in May, the highest increase since March 2008. The genie is out of the bottle for ecommerce and businesses will need to change their thinking to succeed.

While physical stores will compete with each other on offers to lure customers in or attractive window displays, for ecommerce it is all about the digital customer experience. A critical component of this is fast mobile site speeds. The rise of customer expectations and the increasing use of smartphones have combined to highlight the importance of fast-loading and responsive mobile sites. With screen times sky-rocketing throughout the country during lockdown, this importance has grown exponentially.

Milliseconds make Millions

This was the context for the new report fifty-five was commissioned to undertake with Deloitte Digital by Google, titled ‘Milliseconds Make Millions’, in which we were tasked to truly quantify the impact of speed on a wide range of site metrics. We analysed mobile site data from 37 retail, travel and luxury brands across Europe.

Surprisingly, a comprehensive study had not been published before, due to the challenges of producing a sufficient amount of comparable data across several brands to create statistically robust findings. Our analysis shows how site speed factors can affect a range of commercial measures, and how to apply these insights across different sectors. One of the challenges in discussing site speed is that the range of terminology, metrics and dimensions can be confusing for busy executives and digital managers to digest and use to make decisions. We monitored over 30 individual metrics, and reduced them down to a concentrated list of four factors that have the most measurable impact on commercial performance. The results are a real wake up call to brands to put mobile site speed at the heart of their thinking.

Retail

With a 0.1s improvement in site speed in the four areas identified, we observed that retail consumers spent 9.2% more, a significant uplift. In particular speed on product pages is vital, there is an increase of 3.2% from Product Listing Page to Product Detail Page, and a 9.1% increase when progressing to Add to Basket. These findings are based on 20.5m user sessions across 15 retail brands.

Travel

Travel brands have been particularly hard hit during this crisis and will want to do everything they can to win customers when business can resume. We looked at the actual journey a customer takes through the travel conversion funnel progression. With a 0.1s improvement in site speed in four key site speed metrics, we discovered an uplift culminating in a 2.2% increase in check-out completion. A 2% increase was identified at the add-ons stage where travellers are configuring their trips i.e. adding speedy boarding, selecting plane seats or purchasing car hire. So we would suggest that site speed has its greatest impact in the customisation & ancillary purchases steps of the funnel, after the visitors have chosen their base options, and so travel brands may need to prioritise the optimisation of this section of their user journey. These findings are based on 7.4m user sessions across six brands.

Luxury consumers

Out of all verticals studied, the data shows that luxury consumers are the most sensitive to speed improvements. Although design and brand values are key to luxury sites, the flows to key pages like “Contact Us” are greatly increased (a massive 20.6%) when the key site speed metrics were improved by 0.1 seconds. There was a highly significant 40.1% increase in users moving from product detail to add to basket and longer sessions also recorded through the entire browsing journey. For luxury retailers, use of the “Contact Us” and “Book an Appointment” functionality of their sites are proxies for buying intent, as opposed to actual e-commerce transitions on high-street retail and travel sites. These findings are based on 2.1m user sessions across 10 luxury brands.

Businesses – now hugely reliant on e-commerce – need to therefore make site speed a priority and adopt a mobile-first mind-set; introducing the right processes and allocating resources to constantly monitor and optimise their site speed. Our report outlines seven key recommendations for businesses to prioritise site speed.

With ecommerce becoming more critical to businesses than ever before, they need to act now to put this crucial metric at the heart of their thinking. Things may ‘never be the same again’ but businesses that embrace the new reality and adapt to the needs of their customers are best placed to succeed.