In eCommerce, it is critical that sites have foundation to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Matt Ezyk, Director of eCommerce at Pet Supermarket, has an interesting analogy that you probably haven’t heard before.
“Look at building an eCommerce website like building a house,” Ezyk said. “If the foundation isn’t solid, the house will fall down.”
Ezyk made his comments during the kick-off session to Salesforce Connections in Chicago, in a Q&A with YOTTAA CEO Richard Stendardo before a standing room only crowd.
Pet Supermarket sells over 8,000 pet care products and services online and has over 200 stores in over a dozen states.
For Ezyk, delivering engaging customer experience is an ongoing initiative and he believes that fast site speed is the foundation on which all other site experience technologies should be built on
“If a customer has a bad experience, they’re not likely to return,” he said. “If you have a site that’s slow, it’s going to cause frustration and friction, and they will abandon you.”
Following his take on site speed, Ezyk then focused on a recurring issue for many of today’s online brands: security – or a lack thereof. Thankfully for Pet Supermarket, YOTTAA has been able to provide it with much more peace of mind in securing its eCommerce site.
“As you grow a business and invest in SEO, you’re tracking real customers, and you’re also tracking bots. That became a huge problem for us,” Ezyk said. “YOTTAA deploys technology that can detect the traffic coming to the site. Now I’m seeing conversion rates that I know is real, and that helps me with the decisions I make with the business, now I know I have an experience that’s fast but secure.”
Stendardo asked how Ezyk would suggest someone should make the business case for YOTTAA with its CFO or financial team, and Ezyk said it wasn’t difficult at all, actually.
“We shaved three seconds off our average page load time,” Ezyk said. “Every second saved is a significant amount of people that will convert. It was very impactful for the financial leadership team to see.”
Additionally, Ezyk said, installing YOTTAA is incredibly straight forward, which is another selling point you could make to your leadership team.
“It’s just adding a tag, it’s very simple,” he said.
And what about any advice Ezyk has for those brands who find themselves struggling to get a handle on their third-party technologies without sacrificing site speed?
“Everything you build on top of your eCommerce site, whether it’s the imagery, the checkout experience, if anything is going to be slow, especially on a mobile device, they’re going to abandon, and there are plenty of competitors giving them reason to go elsewhere,” he said.
Pet Supermarket started their journey with YOTTAA last year at Salesforce Connections and was able to improve site speed by over 50% resulting in higher conversions and happier shoppers. Start your journey with YOTTAA today.
Click here to view the entire Pet Supermarket session from Salesforce Connections.
