Today, consumers expect an eCommerce website to perform faster than ever before.
Don’t allow a slow eCommerce website, sluggish page load, unsecured security layer, inaccurate search results, and downtime to ruin your eCommerce revenue and tarnish your brand reputation.
We talk to Walters Obenson, Director of Digital Transformation and SAP CX Practices at CXPORTAL. He talks to Business Matters and shares his insights and guidance about the “Five Secrets of eCommerce performance issues improvement and strategic responses to be implemented to overcome eCommerce performance issues successfully for organisations operating within B2C and B2B eCommerce space. To take advantage of seasonality such as; Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc., to sell a high volume of goods online to increase revenue and improve customer’s experience.
According to CXPORTAL online survey conducted in June 2021, “93% of corporate leaders view eCommerce performance as a top priority,” yet “87% of leaders struggle to make significant progress on operating high-performance eCommerce websites.”
Tell me about your company?
Exciting question, CXPORTAL is a fast-growing end-to-end product engineering and digital transformation solution specialist. Established in London in 2017, the company has grown rapidly and now serving clients globally. CXPORTAL is predominantly recognised for its excellence in providing results-driven services such as; bespoke SAP eCommerce Cloud implementation-upgrade, Software and Product engineering, Agile Architecture Enablement, Digital Transformation, Software Consulting, Artificial Intelligence, UX/UI, and Customer Experience.
What makes your company different?
Customer-Centric, we put our customer’s first. We co-operate with our clients to deliver a unique customer journey through user-centred design. Quality and Speed, our results-driven solutions are delivered faster, with high quality and a good value for money, taking the pressure off our clients. Agility and Innovation, incremental development model using the high-calibre Agile, DevOps, CI/CD approach. Compliance and security, our solutions and data are implemented with a robust security layer and framework. Real-Time Digital Insights, we provide our clients with real-time users’ insights and real-time monitoring of key metrics.
What type of businesses do you work with?
CXPORTAL works with various clients, ranging from start-ups to agencies, leading B2B & B2C organisations to improve their business processes, reduce operational costs, and create sustainable growth.
Start-ups: CXPORTAL leverages extensive industry sectors expertise empowering start-ups, providing a wide range of solutions through technology adoption, empowering start-ups, ensuring they succeed.
Agencies: CXPORTAL forms along-lasting strategic partnership with agencies as an extended team to strengthen their workforce, and deliver end-to-end solutions where it matters.
Leading Organisations: CXPORTAL collaborates with large organisations to improve and re-engineer their business processes, improve operations, and identify unprecedented new opportunities for both efficiency and productivity.
What type of challenges are businesses facing today with SAP eCommerce?
One of the significant SAP eCommerce pains we get when onboarding new clients are in the area of eCommerce performance issues, such as; downtime, Cybersecurity, inaccurate search results, and slow page load during peak periods. Today, eCommerce performance issues are critical threats to businesses. Downtime and slow performance are disadvantageous to a company as it leads to negative customer experience and loss of revenue. Meanwhile, an unsecured eCommerce security layer could open the doors for Cyber hackers and intruders to use malicious software programs to gain unauthorised access to customers’ data.
How should businesses optimise and improve SAP eCommerce performance issues using the Five Top Secrets?
The “Five Top Secrets to dramatically Optimise and Improve SAP eCommerce performance issues successfully” is the best practical guide out there for any B2C and B2B organisation experiencing SAP eCommerce performance issues. The CXPORTAL Five Top Secrets has been tested and refined several times. The CXPORTAL Five Top Secrets below provides organisations with the necessary frameworks, tools, best practices and guidance
to SAP eCommerce performance issues improvement, and responses to be implemented to fine-tuned and optimise a low-performance website to a high-performance eCommerce platform and speed to 5X conversion.
Now, let’s explore the CXPORTAL “Five Top Secrets to dramatically Optimise and Improve SAP eCommerce performance issues successfully.
#1 SAP Commerce Website Health Check
#2 Users Experience
and User Interface
#3 Performance Test Design
#4 Security and Compliance
#5 Prepare a Plan B, Back-up and much more….
Furthermore, let’s drill down to explore the CXPORTAL “Five Top Secrets more in detail;
#1. SAP Commerce Website Health Check
With help from CXPORTAL wide range of health check technologies, we help brands perform an all-inclusive SAP eCommerce health check and detailed website scanning, including usability, performance, security and compliance, functionality and mobile-friendliness in run time and much more. Let’s explore the few areas we cover analysing the health check of your website to determine the performance.
UI-UX Design Analysis;
- PDP Pages, 360 Images, Themes and Files sizes Analysis
- HTTPS Pages, HTTPS & HTTP Endpoint
- HTTP to HTTPS Redirect and HTTPS & HTTP Endpoint
- SSL Certificate Check and Security Assessment
- CPU load on DB Server
- CPU load on Application Servers
- Multi-browser, speed check and load time
#2. Users Experience and User Interface
User Experience: Our primary goal is to help brands enable customer’s
experience. Our user experience health check includes an all-inclusive
examination of UX.
User Interface: The most effective User Interface (UI) Design is born from the broader User Experience (UX) process. As you’ll make UX and UI decisions relatively early, this process will help you define precisely how you need to satisfy your audience’s expectations.
Responsiveness: By designing websites that adapt to any device, our robust framework and security capabilities have been refined over many successful, responsive eCommerce implementations, giving our designers and developers world in-class experience.
Accessibility: Accessible sites provide data through various physical
touchpoints, for example, sights and sound providing supplementary site search, navigation and interactivity. This enables and helps disabled individuals’ access and make use of the site; Accessibility is a vital chunk to consider during the design and development phase.
#3. Performance Test Design:
Load testing is an essential process when analysing application performance. Before performing load testing, it is necessary to set your goals, define test procedures, expectations, issues triage and KPIs metrics. Load testing should include several nodes, generating HTTP requests that mirror large volume and actual users and must consist of full-size production data, end-to-end production code testing, and any middle and third-party systems. To identify the response time, user’s limitation, determine server-side capabilities, acceptance and scalability fine-tuning.
Page Load: You might have come across sites that take longer than expected to get loaded when users click on the site to request information.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
Search engines favoured a website that expresses specific technical abilities and features, for example, a responsively designed website with quick loading time and secured connection.
- Fix broken links
- Fix duplicate title tags and identical mate description
- Troubleshoot robot.txt and index for any potential errors
- Analyse bulky code and fix a potential issue
Log Files Analysis: Troubleshoot and analysing the application log files during run time, monitoring log size and suitable level for each SAP Commerce (Hybris) system being logged. Configure and modify the log when necessary.
Common Performance Pain Points: Here, we have some performance pain points;
- Volume of transaction
- Weak database performance
- Transactional or data model issue
- Weak integration design
- Feeble system design
- Code and architectural level
- Poor caching design and setting
- Slow network performance
Below are a few reasons why the performance of your page load could be slow;
- Caching and clustering issues
- Uncompressed and large media files
- Immense Site’s Code
- Content Delivery Network not in use
- JavaScript is slowing Page Load
- CSS not properly optimise
- Slow database due to the increase in data load
- Weak database CPU’s and memory
- Issues with DNS
#4. Security and Compliance
Without secured security capability, your website is at risk for cyber hackers. By measuring your SAP eCommerce website’s security, compliance, and risk assessment, the site operators can better understand the high priority areas to make relevant security decisions. CXPORTAL digital team has highly skilled security experts well-versed in effectively measuring your website’s risk and security to avoid high-value targets since attackers can breach and access vast volumes of customer personal information.
Let’s explore a few areas we cover analysing the health check of your website security and compliance;
- UI-UX Design Analysis
- PDP Pages, 360 Images, Themes and Files sizes Analysis
- HTTPS Pages, HTTPS & HTTP Endpoint
- HTTP to HTTPS Redirect and HTTPS & HTTP Endpoint
- SSL Certificate Check and Security Assessment
- CPU load on DB Servers
- CPU load on Application Servers
- Multi-browser, speed check and load time
#5. Prepare a Plan B, Back-up and much more…:
You still need to be attentive once you have fulfilled all the best-practices steps above on your SAP eCommerce website. You might face a haphazard unpleasant incident that could require Plan B, a Backup plan and much more…. The incident may be of any kind, but you have to keep yourself prepared for the worse when it occurs.
What is the vision of your company in the future?
Strengthen and maintain a long-term strategic partnership with every client, and provide the best-in-class services that increase customer’s value and loyalty. Your reliable one-stop digital innovation solutions partner empowers and transforms businesses’ full potential to compete, win, grow, and scale in the digital age.
Walters Obenson is Director of Digital Transformation and SAP CX Practices at CXPORTAL, Agile and AI strategist has over 16 years’ experience, with excellent records of delivering cost-effective, agile digital transformation and high-performance technology solutions to meet challenging business demands.