Intro
This article reflects our thoughts on current eCommerce systems available out there. We have to say that although things are moving forward over the years, we’re not completely satisfied with what’s currently available out there (free, commercial or open sourced).
You might say that what I just wrote is a bit random thought, but please bear with me for a bit more – I’ll explain.
Example situation
To show you what exactly what do we mean, let’s presume 2 things.
- You’re in eCommerce business
- You’re 100% online store
Since your store is only source of income, you’re going to try to increase profit as much as you can – same as every other business that operates in capitalistic world – and that’s fine. Problem is how to get the maximum, how to even earn 1% more than last time.
Why are you not earning that 1% more
It’s already known that site performance affect sales. Web is full of good and bad articles around the subject, but that just proves the point – it definitely affects completed checkouts.
I’m going to touch the subject of mobile web performance because in 2014, Shopify reported that they had more than 50% of their costumers using some sort of mobile device.
We’re getting to end of 2015 in time of writing this, and one habit seems to be constant for me over the past years – given that existing eCommerce solutions are getting better and better, mobile performance is constantly being ignored or not improved enough.
Just think of emerging markets (Africa for example) – mobile web is usually only source of internet access – and that speed is usually horrible. Our advice would be to optimize for that case, as if it works in that scenario, it will work in acceptable manner in deep mountains of USA with just 2G coverage, and you won’t loose that one customer.
To recap, here’s a simple and short list of things that are performance related and directly affect your sales:
- Page load time increases cart abandonment rate
- Page load time affects search engine ranking
- Slower platforms cost more to host
- Mobile speed performance is awful compared to web
We’re going to try to offer you a solution
We’re starting open source project called STAR commerce. In short – it’s going to allow you to use your existing eCommerce solution with minimal or no effort while enabling your shop to work on 2G while keeping decent performance – oh yeah, it’s going to be free.
More details will be released soon.
References:
http://blog.loadimpact.com/blog/how-bad-performance-impacts-ecommerce-sales-part-i/
https://www.verizondigitalmedia.com/blog/2013/02/ecommerce-performance-website-speed-impacts-your/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking
http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
https://www.shopify.com/blog/15206517-mobile-now-accounts-for-50-3-of-all-ecommerce-traffic