Does your eCommerce platform deliver the significant 3Ss: Speed, Stability, and Security?

Delight your customers, and they will reward your efforts with long-term loyalty. When you provide your online shoppers with unparalleled speed, stability, and security, you generate good business and earn customer loyalty in return. The performance of your online store directly impacts the behavior of your online shoppers. A satisfying experience may result in winning over a new audience, or a dissatisfying one could lead to losing out on even the most faithful audience.

• Almost half of the potential customers abandon a website if the page takes time to load.

• Just a 1-second delay in page response can reduce conversions by 7%.

• Around 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts during the checkout if the process is too long or complicated.

• Moreover, dissatisfied users of your online store may share their negative experiences with friends.

In essence, speed, stability, and security are critical to your online store's success as it nurtures customers' trust. e.g., if shoppers face difficulties while adding to the cart or checkout process, they bounce to another website wondering about the reliability and security of your online store. And once you lose a shopper, the chances are bleak that you can get them back.

To reiterate the significant role of making the online shopping experience a fast, stable, and secure one for shoppers, let us look at some of the most impactful reasons why people abandon carts.

The eCommerce platform that your online store is built upon plays a significant role in supporting the store with the speed, stability, and security required for good business and customer satisfaction. The typical issues that an online store faces with their eCommerce platform are the absence of:

• determination of the critical metrics to be monitored to ensure stability and performance

• visibility of the efficiency of infrastructure and services

• an efficient alerting and incident management system

• the capability to preempt a problem and solve it even before it occurs or an online shopper experiences it

While choosing the eCommerce platform for your online store, you should consider such concerns and opt to partner with one that offers a ready solution for the points mentioned earlier.

Shoptimize is one of India's reputed names in the D2C eCommerce space. We have established ourselves as a mature SaaS eCommerce platform as we are constantly exploring avenues to resolve challenges proactively. Offering an elevated customer experience to our eCommerce store clients and their customers is of priority. For this reason, we have developed an elaborate dashboard that tracks all the key metrics to deliver the best shopping experience to your online shoppers.

We have aptly named the dashboard Vantage, as it gives us the advantage of keeping a watch constantly on all that's happening at the back of your eCommerce store. Vantage has been completely developed in-house by our Site Reliability Team. It has been a very judicious investment towards building trust amongst all stakeholders.

Before the inception of Vantage, our team offered an outstanding level of service in solving such issues, but it required much manual intervention. So we proactively decided to create an always-on system that gave us visibility, transparency, and a channel to alert the right people right on time.

Developing Vantage:

• Our team identified the key metrics that were always needed to be observed (for servers and applications).

• They defined the data that the system would capture.

• Alerts around the data were programmed.

• They were integrated with paging systems.

• The severity level was set so the appropriate action could take place (shoot an email or give a call when it affects the business).

So how does it translate into an advantage for online stores?

Let us assume that you have a shopper on your online store. He is adding items to his cart and is about to hit the Buy Now button.

But with Vantage in place, the Shoptimize Support Team gets an alert that there could be a problem in the Check Out process. The concerned person from the support team immediately receives a call (as the severity level is high). He acknowledges the issue and resolves it even before the customer gets to the point.

With such proactive action through Vantage, the online store can close the transaction and maintain the customer's trust successfully. It is with such precision that Vantage can help online stores spot and close a problem even before it occurs.

Some of the important technical issues that it can flag off and address are pages not loading, broken URLs, problems related to database and infrastructure services, applications, request latency, website inaccessibility, downtime, and matters associated with cart, checkout, and payment, and more.

With our extensive experience of 8+ years and 100+ clients, we have developed Vantage to provide an array of benefits. Let us take you through them:

• Vantage is the one screen that shows it all. It gives the team a quick health check of the online store at a glance.
  

• It ensures that we have the visibility of all key metrics related to infrastructure and database.
  

• It shows just the right amount of data - not too much, not too less.
  

• It visually represents the essential data as line graphs, bar graphs, charts, speedometers, and unit numbers so that anyone can interpret it.
  

• It serves as a robust alerting and incident management system. It gives us the power to resolve critical technical concerns much before they emerge.
  

• It reduces manual intervention to the minimum.
  

• It decreases the interdependence of various teams (project managers, sales team, account managers, support, etc.).
  

• It can show us data related to one store or multiple stores or all of them for the desired time period.
  

• It gives the team the confidence that all the systems are running fine.
  

• It helps us deliver satisfaction to the eCommerce stores and their customers.
  

• It offers an opportunity to draw inferences that can help improve the performance of the online store website (e.g., if there has been a drop in the number of checkouts, one can identify the problems and resolve them)
  

• It provides valuable data for the teams related to digital marketing, SEO teams, and customer support.
  

With the conviction to achieve unbeatable customer satisfaction, a company invests in constant upgrades and technical advancements. Shoptimize has proved it time and again.

As you wrap up this read, we believe you are in a better position to choose your eCommerce platform. You will now know what you need to look out for in association with an eCommerce platform for your online store.