When my partner Dan and I first started talking about starting Lightspeed: High-Performance E-Commerce in the beginning of this year, we never could have expected how a global pandemic would fundamentally change how people work, shop, socialize and entertain themselves as they lead their lives sequestered away in quarantine.
Increasingly, as more internet users move to spend more of their time online (and sites like state unemployment websites are bogged down with unprecedented demand) the case for web performance has never been stronger.
According to an April 28, 2020 article from Forbes:
- U.S. retailers' online year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth is up 68% as of mid-April, surpassing an earlier peak of 49% in early January.
- There's been a 129% year-over-year growth in U.S. & Canadian e-commerce orders as of April 21 and an impressive 146% growth in all online retail orders.
- Online conversion rates increased 8.8% in February, reflecting a level of shopping urgency typically seen during Cyber Mondays, according to QuantumMetric. Source: Forbes
What is "High-Performance E-Commerce"?
As we think of "High-Performance E-Commerce", we think of noticeably fast-to-load and well-designed customer experiences. What this means is your visitors are provided a fast and modern experience in which they can buy or learn more about your product offerings or services. Our goal is to be platform agnostic -- whether that means Shopify, Amazon, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace or even your own custom-built application.
Performance is the User Experience
Have you ever had the experience of waiting for a web page to load while the loading icon spins endlessly? We all have. We all close the browser and walk away. Sometimes we try to visit the page again and sometimes we forget about it. Our goal at Lightspeed is to help brands bring best practices to their sites to make loading their site a positive brand and user experience for users on all modern device types and connection speeds.
Let’s talk ROI: What’s the benefit to my business?
There’s been a ton of research in the performance space to indicate that there’s a direct correlation between performance and business outcomes. Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales which at their scale equates to millions of dollars. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%.
At Accenture Interactive, I saw firsthand how many e-commerce companies pushed bloated, unoptimized web experiences to their potential customers. It wasn’t done maliciously. It’s easy to add third-party tools or unoptimized assets to a site and it’s also easy to forget about them—and the end result is that the user experience degrades over time.
How does it work?
Our offerings, as we see them, are twofold:
- We design and build beautiful, remarkably-fast, custom e-commerce experiences with performance as our guiding light
- We'll audit your website and partner with your in-house engineering team or agency partners to dramatically improve your site’s performance
The web of tomorrow
As the web increasingly shifts to mobile (phone, watch, etc.) devices, brands need to ensure that the customer experience is optimized for popular modern device types over varying connection speeds. Our mission is to ensure the experiences your customers expect match how your site performs.