To help with the crunch of preparing your eCommerce sites for the holiday rush, we’ve compiled a number of statistics and industry research on top offending 3rd parties to guide the way. Keep reading to learn more:

Is your site ready for the holidays? Get a free website evaluation with a Yottaa performance expert.

When it comes to eCommerce holiday planning, retailers are preparing for the rush earlier and earlier each year. So, when is a good time to get started? And when will your competitors be launching their efforts? A survey by BigCommerce revealed that most brands start planning for the holiday season in September, but with nearly 40% starting to plan 1-4 months earlier in 2019.

What is the focus of 2019 holiday planning?

What exactly are retailers focusing on during this year’s planning efforts? The same BigCommerce report also showed that 30.75% of retailers rank site stability and performance as their biggest business concern this holiday season.

And that makes sense, because in order for retailers to live up to the high expectations of online shoppers, retailers are adding more and more 3rd party technologies, such as live chat, personalization, and customer reviews, to their websites…

…even if it means they lose some control over the speed and performance of their website due to heavier pages. Because of this, site performance should be top-of-mind.

For example, of the 1,300 US-based consumers interviewed for the 2019 Retail Systems Research (RSR) report on eCommerce site performance, 66% noted product reviews and ratings as the online features that make shopping most enjoyable:

In Yottaa’s annual 3rd party Index, we found that there was a 50% growth in the number of 3rd party calls per page from 2017 to 2018, and the average eCommerce site has 40-60 3rd parties. All those 3rd parties should equal an amazing customer experience, right?

Unfortunately, 75% or more of page load times are attributed to 3rd party features, meaning these technologies can have a negative impact on your site’s speed, even though you need them to make your shoppers happy.

How can 3rd parties negatively impact your holiday shoppers?

Your shoppers will NOT be happy, however, with the issues that often come along with these added website features. In fact, 3rd parties caused delays of 4.2 seconds per page during the 2017 Cyber 5 Holiday. Yikes!

Considering 90% of consumers reported leaving a site because it did not load in the expected time, adding any amount of page load seconds to your site will turn shoppers away and into the arms of the competition.

What do shoppers expect for a page load time?

3 seconds.

After waiting 3 seconds for a page to load, 66% of shoppers will leave the site. According to Walmart and Amazon, every second after the 3 second mark costs retailers up to 7% in conversions!

You may think you are making your shoppers happy by adding a bunch of features to your site. However, if those features are in turn, slowing down your pages, then adding those features is having an inverse effect, and will actually be costing you sales and hurting your brand.

Which technologies have the worst impact?

In reality, any 3rd party technology can cause an unexpected issue with your site at the worst time — like during a holiday promotion. But which technologies are the top offenders? Because Yottaa measures the saturation and usage of individual 3rd parties across our entire client base, we’ve made a categorized list for you:

Top 3rd Party Offenders

Listed in alphabetical order, the following technologies had a consistent negative performance impact on our customers:

Personalization: 

• Dynamic Yield
• Evergage
• Fullstory
• Google Translator
• Jivox
• Moveable Ink
• MyBuys (Magne+IC)
• Rich Relevance
• Salesforce CQuotient

Tag Manager:

• Adobe Tag Manager
• Ghostery

Ad Tech:

• Adroll
• AdSafe
• App Nexus
• Casale Media
• Google Ads
• Google Syndication
• Krux
• Moat
• OpenX
• Rubicon Project
• Shoprunner
• Smarter Remarketer
• Spotxchange.com
• Steelhouse
• WebCollage

Social Media:

• Instagram
• Photorank

Customer reviews:

• BazaarVoice
• Power Reviews
• Turnto

Do NOT get rid of these technologies!

Cutting down on your 3rd parties, or, “putting your site on a diet,” is not the right way to fix this issue. Although they slow down page speeds, you should not remove them — your online shoppers want them! But you should at least understand the performance impact of these technologies and apply optimizations that will speed up overall load times.

The key is to find a balance between site performance and 3rd parties. By optimizing your 3rd party technologies, they will dynamically load when needed to provide the best user experience. You should also try to increase your 3rd party visibility. This way, you’ll know when any of them are having issues that could be causing your site to slow down, and be able to solve those issues as soon as possible.

Make sure your eCommerce site is ready for the holidays by being fast AND featuring all the technology your shoppers want from an online experience. You don’t have to live with the negative performance impact of 3rd party technologies.

Want to learn more in time for the holidays? Get a free analysis of your 3rd parties with a Yottaa performance expert today.