Getting into the store is good, but can you buy there?
The visitor is naturally not going to content him or herself with the site's home page, but instead will browse through the virtual store, view detailed information on the products for sale, and compare various solutions. The visitor might even, if the site provides for it, take a dynamic look at the computers, turn them around, zoom in, open and close a notebook, "build" an architecture, request estimates and, of course, place an order.
We simulated the behavior of a Chinese web user connecting to a site and performing the actions involved in ordering a computer. The number of actions carried out obviously depends on the simplicity or complexity of the ecommerce site. It therefore takes four actions to order a Dell computer, and five when using the Lenovo or Newegg sites. We voluntarily limited the simulation to the three sites that showed the best access performance.
The user paths were run once an hour for 2 months from 12 cities covering the great majority of the population of Chinese internet users.
These curves chart performances that are completely different from what might have been imagined with respect to the performance of homepage loading.
Newegg comes across as a site that is relatively fast and stable over time. Even if the wait to enter the site is 40 percent longer than on the Dell site, everything runs smoothly once the user has gained access. The five actions required to select a product, add it to the cart, and check out take only about 20 seconds.
The performance curve of Dell's Chinese website is interesting because it shows the momentous impact of the approaching year-end holiday season. This observation highlights the defects of a conceptual approach to this site, designed on a worldwide scale with a simple translation into local languages. In December, the pages were decorated with dynamic objects to attract the visitor to year-end special deals.
When the season was over, page designed changed, so that page weight diminished and the number of objects to load decreased. This example clearly demonstrates how directly conceptual choices affect the web user's comfort.
The performance of Lenovo's site is charted by a curve inverse to that of Dell's. While it gave an honorable performance in December, changes to the site since then resulted in a gradual deterioration in the time it takes for a visitor to place an order.
Understanding the visitor…
China has a complex internet network to operate. Chinese culture favors enhancing the pages of websites with very dynamic objects designed to attract the visitor's attention like a profusion of electronic billboards. This has a direct impact on the performance experience by web users, who must sometimes summon all their patience to successfully browse the sites.
Web designers and technical teams that deploy and operate networks and infrastructures absolutely must become more aware of these constraints and specificities. The time web visitors save on getting out to physical stores may make them more patient online. Nevertheless, differences in performance experienced from one site to another will make the visitor want to redirect to the fastest site, to the detriment of less accessible sites or those which respond more slowly to requests.
Because the maturity level of Chinese web users is on the rise, e-shops are going to have to do whatever they can to convince the visitor that he or she has made the right choice in walking through their virtual doors.
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Christophe Depeux is general manager, IP-Label Technology, Asia Pacific.
