E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 2

Ari Weil
Learn more about Akamai

Optimizing online web performance is critical to keep and convert customers and achieve success for the holidays and the entire retail year. Akamai's The State of Online Retail Performance report lays out the challenges online retailers face.

Start with E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 1


Mobile Users Bounce Around

As noted above, half of the online shoppers browse for products and services on their mobile devices. And of those, more than half are going to bounce. The stickiest consumers are on tablets, where the bounce rate averages 40.6 percent. Desktop users fall in the middle, with a 43 percent bounce rate. Unfortunately, losing up to half of your visitors is the harsh reality of online commerce. Consumers aren't patient, and they are only one back-button click from Google search results and competitors' websites.

A one-second delay can bump the bounce rate by almost 50 percent on mobile, and a two-second delay more than doubles it. Mobile users seem to be the most sensitive ones, but the impacts are similar with delays on desktop and tablet. If you are acquiring customers through search engine marketing campaigns, then these user bounce rates mean you not only missed the chance to show these customers your products, but you also paid a per-click price just to have the user leave the page before it even finished loading.

An efficient and effective strategy for minimizing bounce rate is to be visually complete as quickly as possible and load important page elements above the fold first. Once users can see and interact with the page, they assume the page is loaded even if other elements or third-party scripts are still loading in the background.

A start-render measurement is often the metric tracked here to demonstrate the point in time when something was displayed on the screen. A maximum start-render time of 0.9 seconds on desktop, 1.3 seconds on mobile, and 1.5 seconds on tablets corresponds to the lowest bounce rate on each device.

Third-Party Scripts

When it comes to providing a fast and seamless experience, less is often more. By reducing the number of page elements on a page and by utilizing the least amount of third-party scripts, one can provide the best page performance. But we also should keep in mind the entire customer experience. For example, we know that consumers convert at a higher level on personalized pages, and personalization usually requires third-party scripts. So, should one remove all third-party scripts and give consumers a Google like search page? Probably not. If third-party scripts are used to appropriately improve the customer experience and are loaded asynchronously, they can increase conversion.

Interestingly, the highest-converting desktop and tablet pages contained 20–25 third-party scripts, and the best-converting mobile pages contained 15–20. This is consistent with a joint machine learning project conducted by Akamai and Google which found that user sessions that converted contained 48 percent more scripts than sessions that did not.

That said, those scripts should be used judiciously and optimized well; simply throwing more scripts on the page will certainly not help conversion. Before adding elements to a page, retailers should always ask – what customer struggle point does this address or how does this improve the customer experience? If the answer to these questions is none, then perhaps that new element is not a priority item to add to the page.

Holiday Preparedness Starts Now

The Akamai study offers a lot of data to parse. But what is the real bottom line for online retailers?

Optimize for mobile — its influence on sales is only going to increase.

Monitor your site all the time to spot poorly-performing pages so you don't leave money on the table.

Run load tests before peak traffic times based on real user traffic patterns.

Prioritize customer experience and remove unnecessary third-party tags.

Implement a robust caching and content delivery strategy to ensure uptime and scalability.

Holiday shopping and promotion start earlier every year, so you can't wait until November 22. Start now, be thorough, and make it the best online year ever.

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E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 2

Ari Weil
Learn more about Akamai

Optimizing online web performance is critical to keep and convert customers and achieve success for the holidays and the entire retail year. Akamai's The State of Online Retail Performance report lays out the challenges online retailers face.

Start with E-Commerce Secrets to Retail Holiday Success - Part 1


Mobile Users Bounce Around

As noted above, half of the online shoppers browse for products and services on their mobile devices. And of those, more than half are going to bounce. The stickiest consumers are on tablets, where the bounce rate averages 40.6 percent. Desktop users fall in the middle, with a 43 percent bounce rate. Unfortunately, losing up to half of your visitors is the harsh reality of online commerce. Consumers aren't patient, and they are only one back-button click from Google search results and competitors' websites.

A one-second delay can bump the bounce rate by almost 50 percent on mobile, and a two-second delay more than doubles it. Mobile users seem to be the most sensitive ones, but the impacts are similar with delays on desktop and tablet. If you are acquiring customers through search engine marketing campaigns, then these user bounce rates mean you not only missed the chance to show these customers your products, but you also paid a per-click price just to have the user leave the page before it even finished loading.

An efficient and effective strategy for minimizing bounce rate is to be visually complete as quickly as possible and load important page elements above the fold first. Once users can see and interact with the page, they assume the page is loaded even if other elements or third-party scripts are still loading in the background.

A start-render measurement is often the metric tracked here to demonstrate the point in time when something was displayed on the screen. A maximum start-render time of 0.9 seconds on desktop, 1.3 seconds on mobile, and 1.5 seconds on tablets corresponds to the lowest bounce rate on each device.

Third-Party Scripts

When it comes to providing a fast and seamless experience, less is often more. By reducing the number of page elements on a page and by utilizing the least amount of third-party scripts, one can provide the best page performance. But we also should keep in mind the entire customer experience. For example, we know that consumers convert at a higher level on personalized pages, and personalization usually requires third-party scripts. So, should one remove all third-party scripts and give consumers a Google like search page? Probably not. If third-party scripts are used to appropriately improve the customer experience and are loaded asynchronously, they can increase conversion.

Interestingly, the highest-converting desktop and tablet pages contained 20–25 third-party scripts, and the best-converting mobile pages contained 15–20. This is consistent with a joint machine learning project conducted by Akamai and Google which found that user sessions that converted contained 48 percent more scripts than sessions that did not.

That said, those scripts should be used judiciously and optimized well; simply throwing more scripts on the page will certainly not help conversion. Before adding elements to a page, retailers should always ask – what customer struggle point does this address or how does this improve the customer experience? If the answer to these questions is none, then perhaps that new element is not a priority item to add to the page.

Holiday Preparedness Starts Now

The Akamai study offers a lot of data to parse. But what is the real bottom line for online retailers?

Optimize for mobile — its influence on sales is only going to increase.

Monitor your site all the time to spot poorly-performing pages so you don't leave money on the table.

Run load tests before peak traffic times based on real user traffic patterns.

Prioritize customer experience and remove unnecessary third-party tags.

Implement a robust caching and content delivery strategy to ensure uptime and scalability.

Holiday shopping and promotion start earlier every year, so you can't wait until November 22. Start now, be thorough, and make it the best online year ever.

Related Links

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Related Vendors

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How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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