TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today Shoppimon unveiled its results for the Q4 2017 Online Health & Usability Index--OSHU Index--providing the eCommerce industry once again with benchmark rankings based on how easy it is to shop, and make purchases from online stores. Shoppimon’s data suggests that leading up to the holiday shopping season, online retailers invested heavily in preparation for their stores’ most lucrative time of the year, through updates and upgrades to improve site performance. This investment seems to have paid off, as between September and October of 2017 eCommerce sites on the OSHU Index saw average interactive load times drop by over 10%.
Critically, sites on the OSHU Index managed to maintain that improvement throughout the course of the holiday season, actually improving their speed. Considering the strain these sites were under from increased traffic during this crucial period, this improvement was impressive. OSHU sites closed out the holiday season and Q41 of 2017 a full 13% faster than at the end of Q32. Adobe projected that online retailers would sell $107.4B in merchandise over the 2017 holiday season--based on the speed optimization Shoppimon measured for eCommerce sites in the OSHU Index, Shoppimon estimates that while speed optimization to top eCommerce sites helped increase 2017 holiday revenues by $1.5B, technical Issues cost these sites $11.8B. These technical issues included full site downtime, broken search, and missing store pages, among issues. This data indicates that the eCommerce industry needs to focus not just on performance and performance stability, but overall site health.
Not All Sites or Categories Performed Equally for the Holiday Season
Some retail categories excelled during the holiday season, while others fell behind. Consumer electronics for example, appears dead last in the OSHU index. The consumer electronics sites in the OSHU Index averaged 1.82 seconds for interactive load time across all shopping workflows, a full 56% slower than the fastest vertical, health & wellness which averaged just 1.17 seconds interactive time. Shoppimon’s OSHU Index ranks 117 average sites, but those in the “Bottom 10” experienced double the number of slowdowns when compared to sites in the Top 10 during Q4 2017. These sites also suffered from 140% more severe issues, and were an average of 8X slower than their top performing counterparts.
“We’re proud to announce our latest Shoppimon OSHU Index, which provides insight into the inner workings of leading eCommerce sites like Birchbox, Whole Foods and Walmart, and also provides brands and retailers the world over with the opportunity to directly compare their stores to those of the competition, both within their vertical category and overall,” said Roy Rosinnes, CEO and co-founder of
Shoppimon. “The Q4 OSHU Index results show brands are thinking about how to make their sites lightening fast ahead of key revenue periods. Yet speed issues aren’t the only things that can go wrong, so retailers shouldn’t also ignore the impact of technical and content issues until it’s too late.”
Top Performing Sites for Q4 2017
The Top 10 OSHU Index Overall Winners include a diverse group of brands—seven of nine of the vertical categories evaluated made it into the Top 10. Of these leaders, the strongest performing vertical categories are home & garden, automotive supplies, and apparel, with two online stores represented for each. There is a clear winner in terms of the best performing eCommerce platform within the Top 10 OSHU sites: custom built stores. While leading retail platforms such as Hybris, Adobe Commerce, Magento, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud are all represented in the Index, nine of the Top 10 stores appear to be custom builds.
Here are the Top 10 Shoppimon OSHU Index Overall Winners for Q4 2017:
- Birchbox, OSHU Score: 99.59 (Category: beauty)
- Summit Racing, OSHU Score: 99.15 (Category: automotive supplies)
- Dollar Shave Club, OSHU Score: 98.71 (Category: health & wellness)
- Saatva Mattress, OSHU Score: 98.66 (Category: home & garden)
- Toyota, OSHU Score: 98.11 (Category: automotive supplies)
- Nuts.com, OSHU Score: 97.66 (Category: food & beverage)
- Ritani, OSHU Score: 97.44, (Category: jewelry)
- The Home Depot: OSHU Score: 97.27 (Category: home & garden)
- Talbots, OSHU Score:97.27 (Category: apparel)
- ASOS, OSHU Score: 97.26 (Category: apparel)
OSHU Index is eCommerce’s Only Online Health & Usability Benchmark Ranking
Shoppimon’s AI-driven monitoring technology powers the OSHU Index, and gives brands unique insight into the eCommerce industry as a whole in addition to insight into individual vertical categories. The OSHU Index trends KPIs such as site speed, server downtime, business downtime (percent of time a purchase cannot be completed on the site), and technical issues to reveal what the industry is both struggling with and succeeding in. The Index is created using the OSHU Score, which is a proprietary algorithm developed by Shoppimon that evaluates an eCommerce site on a scale of 1-100,3 and compares online stores within nine vertical industry categories: apparel, automotive supplies, beauty, consumer electronics, department store, food & beverage, health & wellness, home & garden, and jewelry. Monitoring began in September 2017 of the first 87 online stores, and has since expanded to include 117 online retailers. Shoppimon updates the OSHU Index regularly as an educational resource for the eCommerce industry, to help educate site owners and operators on best practices in running a stable, highly- profitable online store that surpasses customer expectations.
Top OSHU Index Vertical Category Winners for Q4 2017
Below are the Top 3 winners per category, based on OSHU Index, with their relative OSHU Scores.
Apparel
Automotive Supplies
- Summit Racing, OSHU Score: 99.12,
- Toyota, OSHU Score: 98.13,
- Tire Rack, OSHU Score: 95.81
Beauty
Consumer Electronics
Department Store
- Sears, OSHU Score: 97.66
- Marks & Spencer, OSHU Score: 95.97
- Walmart, OSHU Score: 94.92
Food & Beverage
- Nuts.com, OSHU Score: 97.68
- Whole Foods Market, OSHU Score: 96.99
- SodaStream, OSHU Score: 94.99
Health & Wellness
- Dollar Shave Club, OSHU Score: 98.75
- iHerb, OSHU Score: 96.89
- Swanson, OSHU Score: 95.95
Home & Garden
- Saatva Mattress, OSHU Score: 98.60
- The Home Depot, OSHU Score: 97.27
- Wayfair, OSHU Score: 95.13
Jewelry
- Ritani, OSHU Score: 97.44
- James Avery, OSHU Score: 97.26
- Blue Nile, OSHU Score: 97.10
Shoppimon Helps Retailers Optimize Sites, Increase Revenue
Shoppimon is shaking up the Application Performance Management market with a SaaS solution that monitors the health and performance of retail websites by mimicking the shopping experience like a virtual secret shopper. Using semantic extraction & heuristics-based AI, Shoppimon’s technology fully automates setup, integration, and ongoing monitoring, by recognizing the key business workflows unique to each eCommerce site. Any issues are then automatically prioritized and escalated in real time, so they can be corrected before real customers ever encounter them, preventing lost sales. By using Shoppimon, retailers see increases of up to 13% in sales.
Retailers can check how their own sites compare to OSHU Index winners or competitors by clicking here.
Methodology:
The Shoppimon OSHU Index consists of two different categories: the Overall Top 10 Performer list, as well as Top 10 lists in each of nine vertical categories. Rankings are compiled monthly (every 30 days) using Shoppimon’s OSHU Index data. The data reflected in the Q4 rankings was collected between 10/01/2017 - 12/31/2017. The OSHU Index’s key measurement, the OSHU Score, is a proprietary algorithm that evaluates an eCommerce site by multiple criteria including average site speed, site slowdowns and their severity, site issues and their severity, and overall stability. 117 sites are currently being monitored for Shoppimon’s OSHU Index, and additional stores will be added each month. New online stores joining the index will be included in the reporting beginning the first full month they participate, and reflected in monthly averages beginning the first full quarter they participate. Certain sites such as Amazon have been excluded from index rankings due to their uniquely complex structure that sets them apart from traditional, single company stores.
About Shoppimon:
Shoppimon is the only eCommerce performance monitoring company that provides real-time visibility and insight into the health, business workflows, and usability of websites. Unlike black box monitoring solutions that generate alerts without identifying specific technical issues causing revenue loss, Shoppimon monitors eCommerce sites by behaving like a 24/7 virtual secret shopper, identifying any problems that impact a shopper’s experience or ability to make a purchase.
With the average eCommerce store losing 13% of annual revenue to hidden site issues, Shoppimon was created to stop that loss--with zero setup, zero integration, and zero maintenance. The world's top online brands and systems integrators rely on Shoppimon to discover and suggest fixes to business-critical issues before actual shoppers ever encounter a problem. Founded in 2014 and backed by Verizon Ventures, StageOne Ventures, and 2B-Angels, Shoppimon is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, visit https://www.shoppimon.com/
1 Time period Shoppimon measured for Q4: October 1st - December 31st 2017.
2 Time period Shoppimon measured for end of Q3: September 1 -September 31 2017.
3 See methodology for more details on OSHU Score, and how the OSHU Index rankings are compiled.
Jessica Jaffe
Sift Communications
jessica.jaffe@siftpr.com