According to Forrester, U.S. consumers on spending e-retail will increase 62% by 2016. That’s good news for retailers, but it also signals growing competition to improve online customer experience in an already crowded space.

So, how do leading retailers win big versus the competition? The answer is simple: engagement.

The Need to Improve Online Customer Experience to Drive eCommerce

User experience and engagement are determined by two primary factors:

1. Speed – The number one element of performance. Your site needs to be fast to deliver top-tier content. It’s no secret that we have short attention spans. The longer the wait for web applications to load, the higher the likelihood of a bounce.

2. Quality Content – Users expect to be engaged in a meaningful way. Your site needs to be fast and able to deliver top-tier content.

Happy end users drive revenue, unhappy end users do not.

Just ask the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. When looking to enhance the efficacy of its online presence, WalMart’s team discovered that a one-second improvement in load time increased conversions by 2%.

On applications with as much traffic as WalMart, a two-percent increase in conversions equates to big bucks. WalMart’s focus on end-user experience is a big reason the company posted a staggering $10b in eCommerce sales in the last fiscal year.

Distinctive Apparel – Yottaa Customer Success Story

You don?t have to be a big-budget giant like WalMart to optimize for your end user. Yottaa customer Distinctive Apparel is a great example – the key to their success is the ability to understand user context perfectly.

Distinctive Apparel, a retailer that owns several retail brands in the apparel space, had a dilemma. Customers demanded image-rich and personalized shopping experiences. In order to meet these user content expectations, Distinctive Apparel’s applications had become bogged down with added content. Load times slowed to a point where users were bouncing and conversion rates dropped.

“Customers demand a quality experience when they shop on our sites, no matter what device, location, and connection speed,” CEO Aldus Chapin explains. “Our goal is to engage our customers at every step during a purchase. This becomes more difficult because a positive online user experience increasingly demands rich content.”

How Distinctive Apparel Gets Blazing Fast Speeds

To remedy slow load times without sacrificing content, Distinctive Apparel needed a unique solution. They found a winning strategy with Yottaa’s patented solutions – including experience acceleration, application sequencing, security monitoring, and integrated business and IT analytics.

Yottaa technology allows Distinctive Apparel to manage, optimize and secure end-user experiences to drive business impact. Users of Distinctive Apparel’s applications are delivered the image-rich content they want at blazing fast speeds (load times accelerated to between 6 to 9 seconds). Moreover, content became optimized for the context of end users with respect to location and device used.

Chapin explained how Yottaa delivers real business results: “Yottaa has dramatically improved the end-user experience across every device, which has opened up new possibilities for us to focus on how to further engage online and mobile users to maximize the business impact of our brands.”

To discover how well your application is performing, you first need to understand which metrics can impact your business results. Learn about these metrics in our free guide. Download your copy by clicking the image below.