Effects of 3rd Party Apps on eComm

Online retailers are increasingly utilizing third-party applications to enhance functionality and user experiences. Is it working? What are the effects of third-party apps on eComm? You’ll be surprised at what a recent survey uncovered about 600+ eComm sites.

Yottaa Inc. evaluated more than six hundred (600) eComm sites to discover what retailers were deploying and what, if any, effect utilizing these third-party tools was having.

What are the more popular third-party applications used on eComm sites? According to Yottaa, they include advertising, technology, live chat,  personalization, recommendation engines, social media, and shopper ratings and reviews.

They documented the average number of third-party applications per site, the number of violations that occurred (meaning the times that an application failed to load, loaded very slowly, or was simply a very large and heavy application), and the net effect that any violations had on the sites’ performance and/or online conversations.

The violations were extensive: 1,200 third-party violations per hour were reported on eighty (80%) percent of retail websites. This is a shocking number.

The Yottaa study demonstrates below, in part, the impact third-party applications have on site performance.
Average violations: 1,543,137 (per brand site per day)
Average time lost: 1,900 minutes (per brand site per day)
Shopper time lost per page: 3.27 seconds
Shopper time lost per session: 99.4 seconds

Effects of 3rd Party Apps on eComm

“Shoppers today expect the same rich experience online that they experience in-store. Third-party applications and content, such as personalization, recommendations, and live chat, are critical to achieving this,” said Rich Stendardo, CEO of Yottaa. “Unfortunately, these applications can also result in poor performance, which has been proven to drive shoppers away to competing sites, resulting in lost revenue.”

Yottaa enables retailers to provide their shoppers with the best of both worlds – lightning-fast performance and an engaging experience through third-party applications. The impact is that customers have increased online conversions 10-20 percent by using Yottaa to get control of these applications and improve site speed.

Retail e-commerce sites are heavy—that is no secret. However, the trend is improving, with a 2016 load time of 4.78 seconds compared to 5.07 for 2015.

So retailers find themselves in a quandary: what do they do when the third-party applications that slow down their sites are also the same ones driving engagement?

Yottaa says that its platform sequences third-party apps to reduce the aforementioned violations. For more information about Yottaa, click here.