Most popular e-commerce articles of 2011

From our Google Analytics page view analysis, these are the most popular news stories and articles from our website in 2011, as voted by you - the reader.

1. Mobile Research
A study piece which shows that 10% of traffic came from mobile devices, but it converts at 40% less.iPads however perform more like PCs.

2. Real world check outs with Google Analytics
An amusing video highlighting critical points in the e-commerce checkout process with reference to the real world.

3. Where e-commerce traffic comes from
An analysis piece summarising where and how online traffic will come to your e-commerce website.

4. 50 ways to increase your e-commerce sales
A 20 minute video of Roger Willcocks speaking at Meet Magento

5. Link building
Detailed article with 25 ways on how to generate links to your website

6. Online fashion sales statistics
A compendium of e-commerce statistics from Drapers

7. Hush re-platforms to Magento
News release about Hush - the lounge & pyjama wear company - moving to Magento

8. Donald Russell launches new Magento-based website

News release about Donald Russell - the online butcher - moving to Magento

9. Planning a new website
A "no holds barred" article about what you should be considering when you plan a new website

10. Magento performance & scaleability

Detailed analysis of a high volume traffic peak to illustrate Magento's scaleability

E-commerce traffic source article: best of 2011

We are thrilled to see that our article on the sources of online traffic remains one of the Top 10 articles on the ECMOD Direct Commerce website.

The other most popular articles are listed here. There are good articles on usability, email and catalogue marketing and social media for lead generation.

E-commerce page sizes

The average website page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive. The figure is 33% up on the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was a svelte 726 kilobytes.  Big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors quit if a page takes too long to appear.

Keep them small!

Full article at the BBC.

Webmaster tools information in Google Analytics

Timely summary Google about how to link your Webmaster tools account to Google Analytics. This means that in one place you can see a summary of your website's SEO performance directly from your Google Analytics account.
The SEO reports in Google Analytics appear under the Traffic Sources section in the My Site tab of Analytics. These reports provide the following general data about your site's performance in Google Web Search results:

Read the full article on Google's blog.

Shima Uma

Office Etc

My Sure Supply

Magento performance and scaleability

Screen Pages recently analysed the performance of its Magento hosting system during a busy seasonal period on a client's website. In summary, we have every confidence that Magento can scale significantly - at relatively low cost - to handle large volumes of transactions. Screen Pages is aware that some Magento website owners struggle with the optimisation and configuration of Magento to achieve satisfactory performance.

As an aside, Screen Pages has invested considerable time in designing and deploying an optimised Magento hosting platform with our partners NTT. Many folk have downloaded Magento, built their site and ended up disappointed with its performance and operation (we would be lying if we said we had not experienced this at first hand).

Summary of results

The website scaled very well and operated with very acceptable response times. Traffic peaked at 50,000 visits on the busiest day of the trading period with close to 4,000 orders processed on that day from about 500,000 page views. Annualised and assuming an average order value of £65 (the average for Screen Pages' clients), that represents sales of £90 million - a handsome level of return from a Magento website.

Upon closer inspection, however, the scaleing is more impressive as the traffic was condensed into a very narrow period during the day: 82,000 of those pageviews occurred in the busiest hour, implying much higher capacity and scale.

Response times were impressive as well. Industry norms are about 2 seconds. Server response times were less than one second more than 83% of the time and impressively, less than 100 milliseconds about half the time.

Page downloads were less than half a second (500 milliseconds) 90% of the time.

Data source: Google Analytics

Hardware architecture

The website ran on shared servers in a private, custom-built cloud environment. These servers were cofigured thus:

* Two load balancers (dual core, 4GB RAM virtual machines) with full page and static content caching - shared across other client sites.

* 6 web servers (quad core, 12GB RAM virtual machines) - shared across other client websites. The system could have run on 4 or less servers, however in our environment, we have found that provisioning a surplus of small machines provides better resilience.

* mySQL database server replicated to an identical server for failover (dual core, 12 GB RAM virtual machines). This configuration provides very high availability and the use of virtual machines means that it can be delivered at much lower cost than with physical devices.

All web servers run a shared configuration and shared storage which eliminates potential propagation and synchronisation problems. It should be noted that the servers were sized to operate at no more than 50% capacity through-out.

The private cloud system provides n+1 resilient IBM hosts running VMWare ESX with high availability features to deploy and manage virtual machines. The servers are linked to a SAN which provides centralised, shared storage. The web servers run behind dual Fortigate firewalls separating the network into three isolated security zones.

Software optimisation

In terms of Magento and software optimisation, the following improvements are deployed as standard across client websites:

- cache management, where pages are stored in caches and served to visitors entirely from memory. This is used in combination with AJAX (asynchronous background updates) to populate dynamic data in the background (for example, basket data);

- Static content merging, where various files (such as stylesheets (CSS) and Javascript files) are merged and downloaded to the browserin combination;

- Browser caching, where content is checked and loaded from the browser locally (if it already has it) or, failing that, directly from the load balancers;

- Selective caching, where only "changes" are refreshed in when catalogue/content updates are applied (as opposed to the whole website).

Conclusions

Magento can scale very effectively and performantly. 50,000 visits per day can be a handled on a small cluster of standard virtual servers running Magento software. This level of traffic would yield - on a normal statistical basis - a £20-50m business. Compared to conventional retail, that's a phenomenal return.

Screen Pages' core business offering - Magento services - is targeted at niche retailers many of whom would be extremely content at this level of trade and performance. The combination of Magento, Screen Pages' implementation experience and e-commerce insight can offer great value for online retailers.

50 ways to increase your e-commerce sales: Roger Willcocks at Meet Magento

Screen Pages was invited to speak at the Meet Magento conference in London, in November. Close to 400 people attended and many listened to Roger Willcocks present 50 hints and tips to increase the sales performance of your Magento e-commerce website.

You can now watch the presentation in video in full:

For those of you who can't keep up with the pace of the presenter: here are the slides in full.

Online shoppers give up after 4 minutes

Online shoppers will typically give up trying to make a purchase after four minutes if they have not been able to get through the retailer's security checks, a new study has found.

Research for Experian revealed that 44% of people had abandoned an online shopping transaction because the checks were taking too long and 43% turned to a competitor after becoming frustrated with lengthy procedures.

The Experian survey found younger adults had the least patience, with 13% of adults under 35 frequently abandoning security checks due to the length of time they take, compared with 10% of 35 to 54-year-olds and 8% of the over-55s.

Source: Experian