An Intellyx BrainBlog for Nacelle, by Jason English
Retailers evaluate their performance in terms of total sales, new customer acquisition, and revenue per customer, offset by any sales costs, including the cost of the goods themselves, goods, and marketing and promotional expenses.
In practice, no matter how well a company does, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why such self-evaluations often result in the same mission: “We need to build a better website to improve the customer experience.”
But what is making ‘a better website’ really going to take? Is it worth the cost and effort? And which features should we build first?
For a modern retailer, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a new e-commerce presence means the total labor, software, service and infrastructure cost of building and supporting a truly responsive, dynamic, accurate data-driven website that can quickly give customers the products and experiences they are looking for.
Reducing pipeline time for customer-facing features
In this series, we’ve discussed how GraphQL’s unique ability to allow users to ‘ask for what they need’ from servers and services simplifies interoperability. We have explained how a canonical data model for assortments of products and offers can speed up digital merchandising and how Nacelle’s approach to managing headless commerce with GraphQL speeds up integration.
Now we’ve come full circle as we seek to justify the value of our investments and prioritize developing future features that could influence customer experience.
Industrial science has long understood the “bullwhip effect,” in which a business continually reacts and makes changes to policy due to current conditions like stock outs or abandoned orders. This thrashing back and forth throws the entire business out of sync as a wrong decision driven by a customer touchpoint cascades to affect upstream supplies, production and logistics capacity.
In e-retail terms, this effect is more than quickly supplying product information and customizing offers at the point of sale. It’s about shortening the pipeline or the length of the ‘bullwhip’ that can impact the timeliness of data and releases delivered to the customer now and in the future.
No retail website or web app is an island unto itself. Each customer session may pass through third-party API services and components for predictive recommendations, inventory, referrals, reviews, customization, and feedback – not to mention the site’s performance and error-handling telemetry.
Retailers want the added customer experience offered by many marketing services, algorithms and partner plugins. However, each additional segment added to the pipeline takes its own bite out of customer response time and potentially creates a performance bottleneck that must be addressed.
So the time it takes to build a new site, the time it takes to make changes to the workflow in the future, and the time spent wrangling with data and components all contribute something to the cost of the site in terms of revenue and value gained or lost.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
