Welcome to Your Biggest, Most Important Store. Is It Up to Speed?
The significance of ecommerce has never been greater, yet only some brands get it right.
At Reaktor, we help large companies innovate within their existing infrastructures and conditions. The most intelligent way to reboot an ecommerce site is not to tear it all down and retrain an entire staff in something new. Rather, it’s to innovate, improve, and build upon existing systems to fine-tune them for success.
Read on to learn more about our approach to optimizing ecommerce performance – working with brands like adidas to help them triple their online sales in three years.
To see how we can do this for you, get in touch.
Be the Intermediary: Take Ownership of Your Customer Experience
Most firms outsource their ecommerce efforts in long-term strategic partnerships with platforms such as Salesforce or SAP. These deals, while fruitful, come with a strong dependence on that outside platform – often at the expense of the company’s own needs. Technology moves fast, so monolithic ecommerce platforms can become outdated or start to feel rigid. There’s little room for customization.
At Reaktor, we work in ways that allow brands to take ownership of their ecommerce within those systems. We modernize ecommerce technology with an approach that transfers central commands away from those traditional ecommerce platforms and onto a custom-built, lightweight API layer, a portal of sorts that then centers the traffic that goes to and from the brand’s ecommerce site.
That allows the company to still run on that external ecommerce infrastructure – the systems that thousands in-house have learned to rely on – but also to experiment and update the site on the new layer, opening up possibilities in everything from gathering data to improving page load times.
The new layer brings with it upgraded web technologies, including TypeScript, React, and Node.js, which make systems easier and more compelling for in-house developers to use and iterate on. With true ownership of the work, a new software culture begins to sprout inside the firm. That in turn attracts more top engineering talent.
Loading… the Importance of Speed
In ecommerce, speed equals money.
Consumers won’t wait too long for a page to load or a checkout system to process a payment. It’s easier to exit the site and shop elsewhere. Studies show that conversion rates drop by 10% for every extra second it takes to load a page. That represents millions in lost sales.
Reaktor specializes in reducing load times throughout the user journey, from homepage to product page to checkout. Prioritizing certain page elements and information over others, not loading everything at once, allows the server to deliver the page to the consumer much faster.
Working on the custom-built API layer offers that flexibility in that it makes these constant iterations possible. We continuously perform A/B testing and implement improvements on specific webpages in particular markets, seeing what works. That allows us to then quickly scale globally the best, tried-and-tested solutions that drive conversion.
Agile working methods on-site with the client also mean that we’re able to implement these speed improvements at a rapid rate. Rather than involving the whole company in a system overhaul, our small teams optimize existing systems in weeks.
How to Optimize an Online Store
Unite platforms
Focusing commands onto the custom-built API layer unifies the user experience from desktop to mobile.
Speed up load times
Prioritizations and loading improvements create an experience where shopping feels like a breeze.
Adopt a faster release cycle
Daily deployments minimize risks by allowing for quick fixes, bringing products to market faster.
Increase capacity for traffic
High-performance middleware with built-in cache memory capability means major shopping days like Black Friday can be handled with ease.
Design for real needs and ensure findability
Constant testing and increased data insight result in better storytelling and discoverability, with tailored cross selling of items and fewer product returns.
Small Steps, Big Results: Design and Engineering That Drive Sales
The best online stores aren’t rolled out in one go: they’re optimized in small daily steps that ensure robust systems.
Online stores consist of user journeys that must feel effortless. Removing obstacles, constantly reviewing the cart-to-order ratio, and optimizing the checkout flow are at the center of the types of optimization we do at Reaktor that move the needle and drive millions of additional revenue.
While systems can be complex, they don’t need to appear that way to consumers. Working on the custom-built API layer allows the firm to transform the UI layer shown to the end customer, uniting the user experience across devices. There’s more room for personalization too. The result is an online shopping experience that’s enticing, and most of all, easy.
