There’s a hidden terror lurking in the shadows of your retail website: tech bloat!
Adding too many apps, scripts, or plugins without a concerted effort to manage their load can haunt your operations and wreak havoc on your bottom line. Let’s explore the chilling impact tech bloat can have on your site and learn how to keep your business from falling into this trap.
What is Tech Bloat?
In an attempt to keep up with trends and new capabilities, many eCommerce leaders end up with an eerie assortment of tech on their site. But in today’s market, every department needs to be operating lean and maximizing every dollar of their budget. Unfortunately, many brands and retailers find themselves with tech stacks that don’t deliver on their eCommerce goals.
Tech bloat is exactly what it sounds like – an excessive accumulation of technology systems and applications. While integrated with good intention on your site, most are bogging down your storefront. These apps may have been used for a short period of time then abandoned or may have become redundant when another application was added by another team.
Tech bloat can be like finding skeletons in your closet – ghost of apps past lurking behind the scenes, slowing down your site and haunting your budget. In a recent episode of Yottaa’s Retail Tech Talks, Yottaa CPO Darin Archer elaborates:
As Darin explains, it’s no surprise many brands have found themselves in this scary position. The market has changed a lot, and adding tech after tech is no longer a good way to generate additional revenue. In fact, there are several negative impacts to tech bloat your team should be aware of.
The Scary Impact of Tech Bloat on your Retail eCommerce Site
Here are a few of the scariest problems caused by tech bloat for eCommerce retailers:
- Added Complexity – Much like a haunted house filled with cobwebs, too many scripts and apps can make your site operations feel deathly slow. With everything loading at once, pages can become sluggish, leaving shoppers lost in a maze of delays – a nightmare for their experience and your brand.
- Drained Resources – With tech bloat, you’re paying for a graveyard of unused or overlapping tools. Many eCommerce businesses are haunted by subscriptions to tools they barely use, draining precious resources on maintenance or troubleshooting without delivering much in return.
- Reliability Nightmares – Like a creaky floorboard in a haunted house, too many tools can undermine your site’s reliability. Each added third-party increases chance of errors, outages or inconsistencies, which turns a sweet shopping experience sour. Plus, managing compliance across various tools becomes complicated, making it harder to meet standards and keep your site running smoothly.
- Poor Customer Experiences – Imagine giving your customers a smooth, seamless checkout experience—only for them to run into a nightmare when they need to swap something in their cart or add a promo code. Tech bloat can turn these interactions into a disjointed maze, with slow load times and inconsistent functionality, leaving customers frustrated and unsure about your brand.
- Scaling Struggles – Just like trying to escape a haunted house, scaling your site with tech bloat is tricky. Each new initiative or integration becomes harder to implement with a bloated site, potentially causing delays in launching new features or handling increased traffic.
How to Recognize Tech Bloat In Your Stack
In a classic horror movie, most of the characters don’t realize they’re in trouble until it’s too late. The same can happen with eCommerce leaders trying to recognize if they’re dealing with tech bloat. Yottaa’s CFO Carlos Famadas has some great advice on the subject.
A few weeks ago in our first episode of Retail Tech Talks, Famadas spoke about a new regular cadence to tech stack audits that modern retailers need to adopt. In the additional clip below, he sheds light on three signs and signals to identify if you’re dealing with tech bloat – tech redundancies, bloated subscriptions, and missed delivery on ROI.
How Yottaa Can Help You Get Rid of Tech Bloat
This spooky season, don’t let tech bloat become the monster under your bed. Streamline your tools and focus on what truly adds value.
Want to know how Yottaa can help? We’ll leave you with another clip from Darin Archer, on how Yottaa works with leading retailers to identify the impact different applications are having, and rid their site of demons once and for all!
To assess the tech bloat on your own retail site, and ultimately improve site speed and conversion rates, get in touch with our team here.
