In the late 2010s, retail was actively engaged in IT and borrowed solutions from technology companies. They began to communicate with customers through mobile applications and chatbots and optimize logistics, warehouses, and merchandising with the help of AI.
If then digital technologies were an experiment for retail, then by 2020, they have become a necessity and the basis of competitiveness. Large online stores create their own IT departments and implement the latest developments. The site and applications are becoming the main tools for sales and customer communication, displacing offline points.
In this sense, the reliability and speed of the site and applications are critical business tasks. Buyers should be able to instantly view products and place an order. At the same time, on the days of sales at a large online store, the number of visitors can grow many times over, the site or application should not fall under this load.
Let’s figure out what technologies today help retail organize the most reliable and fast communication with customers.
How To Increase Conversions, Get Your Site To The Top And Defend Against DDoS Attacks With One Solution
As many as 40% of customers are not ready to wait longer than 6 seconds for website content to load. The page takes a long time to load – buyers leave for another site. This is sad in itself, but it also affects the position of a site in search engines: both Google and Yandex are talking about this. The potential buyer does not wait for the download and closes the page – the site sags in the search.
The opposite is true: the faster a site loads, the easier it is to get its pages to the top, and the more buyers find it through search engines. The optimal loading time in 2020 is 3 seconds, as Google calls this figure.
Especially often, problems with downloading the content of the catalog and other pages of the site arise if the online store’s customers are located in different regions – this applies to most large online stores. In this case, it may delay the transfer of content from the server stored to users due to their geographic distance.
To solve problems with search engines and delivery of content to remote buyers, you can use a CDN (content delivery network) – the technology is also mentioned in the recommendations of both Google and Yandex. For pages to load quickly, the content located on the server, such as product images, texts, and fonts, is duplicated at intermediate nodes located in different geographic areas.
As a result, when a user visits the site, the content is downloaded not from the main server but an intermediate node – the download time is reduced. Therefore, site content, physically located on a server, for example, in Moscow, will quickly load for buyers from any region.
After switching to CDN on the online store’s website, the loading of the product catalog is accelerated for all users, regardless of how far they are from the site where the site is located. Even if your store’s server is located in Vladivostok, the catalog will quickly open both in Siberia and Kaliningrad. As a result, conversion increases, and during peak sales, the site does not lose its stability.
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