Where’s the ROI?

Image via CrunchBase

This from Internet Retailer:  “Zappos.com [now part of Amazon] posted the best rating in the Gomez Inc. high broadband availability tests for October. Web shoppers could access the shoe and apparel retailer’s site 98.55% of the time last month.” To put this number in perspective, the average high broadband availability for the top 50 e-tailers in October was 92.33%.

While the average e-commerce channel marketer thinks long and hard about website availability, senior management might not always agree. After all, investing to make sure your website is always available isn’t as sexy as, say, a new Flash app, or a Facebook page.  If you’re in marketing, it’s sometimes easier to secure an investment for an externally-facing marketing component rather than a mission-critical piece of the backend like website availability. If you’re in IT, of course, you’re likely to have better luck.

E-commerce is incredibly mature compared to where it was 10 years ago. In fact, there is so much distance between us and the initial wonderment of having an online store that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that one of the benefits of selling online is 24-7 availability. if you have a brick-and-mortar location closing at 8 PM, your conversion rate drops to 0% at 8:01. If you open up an online store, while you may not see that much traffic during off-hours, you have a pretty good shot at converting that traffic that you wouldn’t have otherwise. On some of the sites I’ve managed, I’ve seen some crazy impulse purchases at 3:45 a.m that are 5, 6 times the average cart – all sales that wouldn’t have been captured otherwise.

If being able to capture all transactions in off-hours is important, the same goes even more so for during peak times. And yet, plenty of e-commerce sites face sporadic availability issues during peak hours. Despite the fact that keeping your online store up and running 100% of the time should be the goal, it’s pretty shocking how many big businesses are lacking in this area. That same phenomenon is true any times over for smaller businesses. Most of the small business owners I know have little to no idea what website availability even means, or why it’s so important. you don’t even need to start with a major investment: checking out a tool like HostTracker will pay huge dividends to start.

Speaking of website availability paying dividends, take a look at Zappos’ stellar ranking in this category. Pretty compelling case for availability being a high-ROI initiative, wouldn’t you say?

Uncategorized Amazon, Business, Conversion rate, Electronic commerce, Online shopping, Zappos