3 Qualities You Need to Deliver a High-Quality Online Retail Experience

With online sales outpacing in-store buys, it’s more
crucial than ever to offer users a high-quality retail experience. Here are
three critical success factors for e-business.

February
2019 was a banner month for the U.S. retail market. It was the first time in
history that America’s online sales outpaced in-store purchases, marking the culmination of a two-decade shift in
traditional retail growth trends.

In the
late 1990s, online sales accounted for only 5% of the retail market. While
brick-and-mortar sales still beat online in the restaurant and automobile
sectors, online has cornered the market for general merchandise.

Online’s
outperformance of in-store retail confirms one thing: People prefer to buy most
things online. That’s not to say, however, that any old online shopping
experience will do — just the opposite. The emergence of e-commerce redefined
the customer experience by offering more products, channels, and brands than
customers had ever seen before.

A choice
between endless products was once the exception, but it has become the expectation
for consumers. This change puts retailers in an awkward position: No one can
afford to avoid e-commerce, yet thriving online requires precision and
perfection. All the potential of online sales goes out of the window when
shoppers can take their business to your competition with just a few clicks.

Delivering
a high-quality online retail experience isn’t easy, but it doesn’t require the
resources of Amazon. Instead, focus on three critical success factors for
e-business:

•
Availability: It’s hard to love a
site that isn’t there. Unfortunately, websites are vulnerable to a bevy of
cyberattacks and operational issues, any of which can take them offline or
cause them to perform poorly. One of the priorities is managing cybersecurity,
which becomes a lot easier with the aid of security infrastructure automation.

Instead
of racing around trying to identify and address emergencies, SIA does the
monitoring and sends alerts to administrators telling them when, where, and why
their input is required. Maintaining site performance still requires a lot of
work, but automation handles the worst of it. It’s why, for example, O’Reilly Auto Parts can
put a website that services more than 5,000 stores in the care of a five-person
security team.

•
Responsiveness: Most sites are
mobile-optimized, but what about more nascent devices like smartwatches and VR
headsets? Visitors expect sites to adapt to their devices and to load quickly —
no matter what. These expectations are so ingrained that an e-commerce website
making $100,000 a day could lose $2.5
million in sales annually because of
a one-second page delay.

Maintaining
responsiveness will be an overwhelming and ongoing effort, which is yet another
reason retailers are rushing to automate. Automation allows an in-house IT team
to focus on perfecting the user experience while SIA detects, triages, and
resolves operational issues.

•
Personalization: How has e-commerce
changed consumer retailing? In large part, by raising the stakes for
customization. More than 90% of consumers will
likely do business with brands that remember their preferences, but that’s
complicated.

Personalizing
all channels — not just a website — depends on leveraging customer data on a
massive scale. That data is also subject to strict new regulations like GDPR,
making strong data security a necessity. Automation ensures that data is an
asset by allowing companies to leverage it on a large scale for personalization
without increasing their threat exposure. Essentially, automation allows
security to scale with data volumes.

It’s not
hard to read the writing on the wall when it comes to retail industry growth
trends. More sales will shift online, but whether they shift toward specific
retailers depends on the experiences those retailers offer. Automation doesn’t
guarantee happy customers, but it goes a long way toward ensuring the kind of
experiences they expect without heaping a ton of extra work on IT.

Does network automation sound like something your retailer’s operations team could use?  Try Indeni now as a full featured VM in your own lab.