Attracting and retaining online consumers

Kezia Crawford-Cousins, director of Qualica Technologies which designed and maintains the backend of 1time airline's website, says there are a number of key factors that corporates and online retailers should consider when constructing a website to service their customers.

Key factors

“A website's ability to perform adequately under stress is a function of three main factors: network stability, hardware and software architecture,” he says. “These can all have an influence, particularly on load times, which could result in users looking for other sites, should their intended URL not open fast enough. Along with design-related factors such as navigability, these performance issues will have a significant effect on the rate at which consumers return to your site.”

According to a study of over 1000 overseas online shoppers by Jupiter Research, 75% of shoppers would go elsewhere if the site took longer than four seconds to load. In terms of priorities, “poor load times” was ranked second only to high product prices and shipping costs as a factor causing dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

“While South Africans may be prepared to wait longer, given the absence of true broadband in this country, the principle still applies,” he says.

Crawford-Cousins says being responsible for the 1time website has given Qualica insight into the process of building and maintaining a site capable of carrying large amounts of traffic.

Network capacity

One of the most prominent challenges faced by websites in South Africa is the lack of bandwidth. Many sites with content management systems, booking systems and billing interfaces are hosted overseas in places such as the UK and connect to the locally hosted website through a virtual private network (VPN).

“This can create capacity issues if sufficient bandwidth is not purchased for the link between the website front end and the backend overseas where the information is stored,” Crawford-Cousins says. “In this case, even if well-designed hardware and software architecture is in place, the site could still perform poorly.”

The solution is a relatively simple, although often expensive, one: companies simply purchase more bandwidth.

To understand the bandwidth needs of the site, the network needs to be stress tested before it goes live to be certain it will be able to respond to an above average number of users.

Hardware

Crawford-Cousins says there are two aspects to ensuring the hardware does not cause the site to be sluggish. Firstly, the hardware architecture needs to be designed to handle more than the expected traffic which the site will carry. Along with sound architecture, hardware with the correct capacity needs to be deployed.

“Key issues with hardware are scalability and redundancy. The hardware needs to be deployed in such a way that should additional hardware be needed, it can be added without difficulty. Secondly, in order to ensure redundancy, the hardware should be deployed across at least two sites, so that if one site goes offline for whatever reason, the other ensures the continued operation of the business,” he says.

The hardware should also be deployed behind secure firewalls. These in turn can be used to assign traffic to the various servers, ensuring an equal distribution of the stress brought about by additional users on the site, and minimising the risk of downtime.

Software

As with hardware, the software architecture is of vital importance. The software architecture needs to be optimised to facilitate easy access by users and the way it interacts with the database in particular is of extreme importance, Crawford-Cousins says.

The database needs to allow both quick and easy access from the website to the backend, and ensure that multiple users can access the database simultaneously.

“In the case of an online retailer, multiple users accessing the site to purchase tickets need to be able to search through the database and make bookings simultaneously without causing the whole site to come to a standstill,” he says.

Solving the problem

Crawford-Cousins says the problems experienced by a website can be rated according to how easy they are to solve. Network capacity and hardware problems can generally be solved by throwing more bandwidth or boxes at the problem.

However, if the problem lies in the software architecture, this could be more serious as it involves a complete redesign of the backend. Companies therefore need to ensure that the core architecture is sound and the website is scaleable, in case more capacity is needed.

“For example, while a software rewrite may solve the problem of a poorly performing website, this solution may take too much time. A website with a reasonably well-designed software architecture can be improved by simply deploying more hardware or purchasing more bandwidth,” he says.

Dialup

It is also vitally important that websites are geared to run on a dialup connection, given the lack of broadband access in South Africa, Crawford-Cousins says. Website performance is, after all, also affected by external factors such as the geographical location of users and the type of connectivity they may be using.

“Companies and online retailers need to understand that their network, hardware and software architecture may be geared for a LAN environment which means users with high speed access will have a good experience when accessing the website. However, the front end and backend need to be structured to allow easy access from users anywhere in the world using any type of connectivity.”

A tool like Qualica's User Experience Monitoring (UEM) platform will assist companies with understanding how their site performs from an internal perspective, as well as on the various connectivity types and how websites can be optimised to take all these factors into consideration, Crawford-Cousins concludes.