Whoosh! 2020 Online Holiday Shopping Skyrocketed. What Did We Learn?
By: Caitlyn Knezevic | January 6, 2021 | 3 Min Read
2020 was rough, but 2021 doesn’t have to be. What did we learn throughout this holiday season?
E-Commerce saw an unprecedented boom throughout 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, consumers began the switch from in-store shopping to relying on retailers’ websites to complete their routine purchases. Brick-and-mortar stores adapted through offering curbside pickup, especially if they did not have a robust e-commerce presence (if they had any at all). But, as the months continued on, people remained at home, and the biggest shopping events of the year were fast approaching.
According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, “online sales grew 49% compared to 2019” when compared between October 11 through December 24. Additionally, they reported that holiday shoppers shopped earlier than years past. This is most likely due to ensuring their gifts arrived on time for the holiday season, as well as taking advantage of the incentives businesses provided early on.
With all of the additional traffic, not all businesses were fully prepared to handle the volume that came to their websites. The e-commerce technology company Yottaa monitored and reported on site outages of major retail brands during Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Yottaa’s CTO Bob Buffone explains that “the cause of these site outages (were) usually the site’s inability to handle the surge of holiday traffic.” Reported notable brands and websites that dealt with website performance issues with a significant number of customer complaints include:
- American Girl
- Best Buy
- Dick’s Sporting Goods
- LEGO
- M∙A∙C
- Micro Center
- Missguided
- PayPal
- PetSmart
- PlayStation
- Toys"R"Us
- Walmart
- Zara
Not only are site outages bad for business, but they are bad for your brand. Customer complaints can go far and wide on social media and influence other shoppers not to purchase from your company. The best foot forward is through optimizing your website, so that your business can stay ahead of the competition and impress both your customers and your competitors’ customers when they come to you.
While there are many ways to optimize your website, there is one key and easy method that a lot of companies overlook—optimizing your website imagery. Website imagery can account for the majority of a website’s page weight. Not optimizing your images can affect your page load speed, which is something important for SEO ranking and customer happiness. If you reduce the amount of weight your images add to your overall page weight, your website will load much faster.
In our latest press release, we present our findings of image and page weight analysis of the top 20 retailers on the National Retail Federation’s Top 100 Retailers’ websites:
“Image and page weight affect how quickly websites display for users depending on image format selections, pixel dimensions, device type, bandwidth, and browser type. Optimized sites provide the best user experience and fastest load times, which are critical for search engine indexing and capturing revenue from mobile customers.”
It is imperative that you take into consideration how your website handled the 2020 holiday season, what your customers were saying about your online presence, and start strategizing today to be prepared for whatever 2021 throws at your business.
Here are a few things to help you prepare for 2021:
- Run an analysis of your website with our free website optimization tool. LiquidPixels Optimize™ will compare your total image weight against your total page weight, and show you how much can be saved with imagery optimization.
- Read about imagery clarity and performance, and why achieving optimal balance is critical to easing your production imaging burdens: https://www.liquidpixels.com/production-imaging
- For companies who have products that allow for heavy customization, a large library of fabric patterns, or just hundreds or thousands of SKUs, learn how to balance efficiency and customization: https://www.liquidpixels.com/advanced-imaging
- Perhaps it is time for an upgrade to your entire ecosystem. Learn how enterprise-wide dynamic imaging solutions can integrate with every aspect of your business to improve your ROI and streamline workflows: https://www.liquidpixels.com/enterprise
