December 27, 2018
Delivering a great customer experience when your store has light foot traffic is fairly easy. But when your store is packed and your staff is swamped, it’s easy for the customer experience to suffer. The same thing can happen online.
Modern e-commerce sites leverage an array of technologies from multiple solutions providers to help consumers shop. Since customers end up interacting with many of these technologies, their reliability, speed, and consistency impact the customer experience. Just like physical stores, most of these solutions work perfectly fine when traffic is light but the real test comes when sites are inundated with visitors. And no time is more taxing than the biggest sales season of the year – holiday.
In fact, during Black Fiveday alone, Curalate’s shoppable content experiences were seen over 400 million times. Which is why we invest so much into making sure our social commerce solution performs under pressure. And it’s important to us to not only deliver fast, reliable experiences, but to deliver the best experience among other competing solutions in our space. So during this Black Fiveday, we didn’t just monitor our performance closely, we also tracked the performance of a number of competing solutions. What the data shows can help provide you guidance on things to consider when selecting a UGC provider.
Above is a summary of Uptime (Reliability), Latency (Speed), and Latency Distribution (Consistency) results from Nov 22-26 2018, as measured by an independent third-party vendor. Curalate had a faster page load time than all competitors and exhibited a much tighter range in page load time, ensuring a consistent, quality user experience. In fact, Curalate was as responsive and dynamic as ever: our APIs served ~400 million content impressions and we maintained perfect uptime and consistent, low latency (~150ms). In comparison, we observed multiple competitors who suffered outages, ranging from 5 minutes to 1 hour. Additionally, some competitors exhibited average page load times between 2x – 5x as slow as Curalate’s. Learn more here.
Our commitment to high-quality service isn’t new, nor does it only come into play during the holiday season. We understand that if we want to work with the world’s best brands, we have no choice but to deliver best-in-class solutions 365 days a year.
If you’re new to social commerce and still evaluating what to look for in a UGC provider, let us know. We’d be happy to talk through which factors you should keep in mind when making a decision. If you’re already working with a UGC vendor, we’d love to show you how well you performed against your competitors in latency and uptime this Black Fiveday – send us an email at hello@curalate.com.
