10-Step Playbook for Online Success

10-STEP PLAYBOOK FOR
ECOMMERCE SUCCESS
How to Improve your Website Performance and Sell More

APPLIED INNOVATIONS10-Step Playbook for eCommerce Success
WELCOME
CARA PLUFF:
DIRECTOR OF SALES AND MARKETING, APPLIED INNOVATIONS
About Applied Innovations
Applied Innovations is a Boca Raton, FL based web presence provider that specializes in hosting
on the Windows Server platform.
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Overview
10-Steps to eCommerce Success
Step 1: Site Inventory
Step 2: Assessment
Step 3: Projections
Step 4: Branding & Company Image
Step 5: UX Testing
Step 6: Performance Optimization
Step 7: Management
Step 8: Security Implementation
Step 9: Availability & Redundancy
Step 10: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
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Is your site ready for your busiest day of the year?
68% # who give up and leave with bad user experience on a site
25% # that abandon their shopping cart because navigation is too complicated
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What’s Your Busiest Day?
• Electronics Store– Black Friday/Cyber Monday
• Bakery – Valentine’s Day
• Clothing Retailer – Back To School

Ecommerce Success Stories
WALMART, CYBER MONDAY 2014
 Walmart doubled the number of deals available for Cyber Monday.
 More than 1.5 billion page views processed between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
 Cyber Monday was Walmart’s biggest day of online orders ever
 70% mobile traffic over 5 days
 Walmart dubbed it “The New Black Friday.”
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The average cost of downtime on Cyber Monday equals
$4,700 PER MINUTE
WHY IS SUCCESS SO IMPORTANT?

Opportunities Lost
BEST BUY AND SONY STYLE
What happened?
 Tablet users on Cyber Monday experienced high error rates.
 This fail was coined “Biggest mobile fail of this holiday season.”
What was the cause?
 The websites weren’t optimized for tablets
How could this be avoided?
 Basic UX – Does the website load properly on all browsers, devices
and operating systems.
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Performance Playbook
10-STEP PLAYBOOK FOR SUCCESS
 Site Inventory
 Assessment
 Projections
 Branding & Company Image
 UX Testing
 Performance Optimization
 Management
 Security Implementation
 Availability & Redundancy
 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
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TRAINING CAMP

1. What is the current state of your website?
 Are the content, files, and images current?
 Are the URL’s still going to the correct location and are there
any broken links?
2. Create a content inventory with a site inventory
spreadsheet and repository.
3. Use a labeling system to categorize and sort
your content.
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4. REVIEW SOCIAL MEDIA
 Facebook
 Twitter
 LinkedIn
 Google+
 Pinterest
 YouTube
 Other Directories
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Step 2: Assessment
1. LOAD TESTING
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Get the true picture of what
your current website &
platform can accommodate

Step 2: Assessment
2. PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
 Is your site fast enough?
 Is your site fully optimized for speed?
 Is your site responsive on all devices?
 How do your individual applications perform?
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Did you know that 40% of users will abandon a
page that doesn’t load in three seconds?

Step 2: Assessment
3. SCALABILITY ASSESSMENT
Measures your capability to expand your platform &
support growth.
4. HOSTING RESOURCE ASSESSMENT
 Memory
 CPU
 Storage Space
 Bandwidth
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Step 2: Assessment
6. SECURITY ASSESSMENT
Measure the security position of your system or organization.
• What are the potential threats – internal and external that can pose a risk?
• What issues have been experienced in the past?
• Are you required to be compliant?
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Step 3: Projections
ESTIMATE GROWTH
 Look at your traffic over the past 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years
 Analyze where your traffic is coming from and why
 Recognize seasonal or promotional patterns/plans
 Will your hosting resources need to change over the next 1, 2, and 5 years?
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Step 3: Projections
TRAFFIC SPIKES
What marketing efforts or
events do you have planned
and will they have an effect on
site traffic?
Do you have seasonal periods
where your site traffic
increases? Cyber Monday?
Summer? Oprah effect?
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OFFENSIVE SCHEME

DEFINING YOUR BRAND
Mission and Vision - What is your company’s mission and vision statement? Does your branding
and website reflect both?
Niche - What do you do better than all of your competition? What is your unique
value proposition? Is this communicated on your site?
Buyer Personas – Research your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers of
your products and services. Give each buyer a detailed description.
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Step 4: Branding & Company Image 19
CHARLIE
CEO
ECommerce Industry,
Male, 55
Master’s Degree,
Wants ease of use,
hands off
management.
STACEY
Graphic Designer,
Female, 40
Tech-savvy
Wants quick set-up,
access to help
anytime, and
simple solutions.
BEN
Developer
Male, 32
Uses reddit to make
decisions.
Doesn’t want help,
wants tools and
reporting.
Business
Owner
Freelancer/
Startup
Web
Developer
SOME BUYER PERSONA EXAMPLES

INFLUENCER MARKET
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Step 5: UX
User Experience (UX), “The way a person feels
about using a product, system or service.”
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BRING
VALUE
BE EASY
TO USE
BE VISUALLY
APPEALING

Stage 5: UX Testing
HOW DO YOU ANALYZE & UPGRADE UX?
• UX Experience Audit
• Google Analytics
• Heat Maps & Split Testing
• Baseline Performance Report
• Shopping Cart Audit
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67%of shopping carts
are abandoned online

Stage 5: UX Testing
HEAT MAPS, SPLIT TESTING
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Crazy Egg – Heat maps Optimizely - A/B test

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE
• Optimize Images – Reduce large file sizes
• Streamline Code – Remove excess spacing and condense code
• Limit – Flash, embedded media, third party widgets and plugins
• Research – Hosting solutions and platform options
• Spam – Use a spam blocker and use captchas
• Compress – Compress web content
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Content Delivery Network (CDN)
“a system of distributed servers that deliver webpages and other web content to a user based on
the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage, and a content delivery server.”
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Is your consumer
base located across
a large geographical
area?
Do you have
unpredictable
online traffic
patterns?
Do you expect a
traffic surge due to a
promotion or event?

LOAD BALANCING
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SCALING
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Memory CPU Storage
MACHINES

CLOUD PLATFORM OPTIONS
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Public Cloud
Applications and storage are
available over the Internet in a
shared environment.
Private Cloud
A highly secured environment
with instances and workloads
fully dedicated to your
business.
Hybrid Cloud
A cloud computing
environment which uses a mix
of on-premises, private cloud
and public cloud services with
orchestration between the two
platforms.

Step 7: Management
BENEFITS OF MANAGEMENT
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Increased Efficiency: Enhanced
tracking and the ability to respond more
quickly to problems.
Reduced Downtime & Risk:
Dedicated team to address and
mitigate any issues.
Expenditure: Low capital
spending and predictable
monthly costs.
Up-to-Date Patch Management:
In-house IT departments may let
things slip when they are too busy.
Understanding of Infrastructure: Experts are on
the lookout for anything that might put the client’s
IT environment at risk.
Capacity Planning Information: Monitoring
tools analyze trends on IT capacity and
performance needs.
24x7x365 Assuredness: Highly resilient,
secure infrastructure and increased
service levels.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
Data centers that are available, resilient and
redundant for maintaining business continuity.

Step 7: Management 30
66KAverage Salary of a
Systems Administrator
vs.

DEFENSIVE SCHEME

Security Breaches
 44% of small businesses and 48% of enterprises admit to being a victim of a security breach.
 Average cost of an incident –$9,000 for a small business to more than $100,000 for an enterprise.
Average downtime due to a security breach:
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38%: Less than 1 Day
40%: 1-3 Days 7%: More than 1 Week
11%: 3-7 Days 5%: More than 2 Weeks
80% of security breaches are crimes of opportunity and
surprisingly the largest security threat is employees.

Edge Security Router & Firewall
Intrusion Prevention System
Core Security Router & Firewall
Dedicated Firewall
Server-Level Security (Windows Firewall, Trend Micro, AV)
Proactive Monitoring/Reporting
DDoS Mitigation
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High Availability Automatic
Failover & Clustering
Redundant Network &
Hardware
Load Balancing
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DATA CENTER
What to look for:
 Data Center Security & Certifications
 Global Connectivity & Speed
 Infrastructure Redundancy & Operational Reliability
 Disaster Recovery Planning & Preparation
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Step 10: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery 36
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
Business Continuity - Planning, preparatory and related activities to ensure that an organization's critical
business functions will either continue to operate despite disaster
Disaster Recovery – A set of policies and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital
technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.
76%
experience
an outage
13%
natural
disaster
25%
will not
reopen

Step 10: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
What should a disaster recovery plan include?
 A disaster recovery team, responsibilities and tasks.
 A vulnerability assessment including the kinds of disasters that are most likely to occur.
 How quickly critical business functions must be recovered.
 A communication & full recovery plan (including how you will communicate with customers).
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WHAT A DIFFERENCE THE CLOUD MAKES…
Businesses which used the cloud were able to resolve issues in an average of 2.1 hours, nearly
four times faster than businesses that didn’t use the cloud (8 hours).

Why Applied Innovations 38
• Top 5 In The World for Connectivity
• Ultra Performance Hardware & Network
Your Website Availability &
Performance Matters
• 24x7x365 Support
• US-Based, Engineers not Call-Takers
You Want Help When You
Need It
• Scalable Solutions to Control TCO
• Prorated Billing w/ Money Back Guarantee
You Want to Know You're
Getting the Best Value
• 1st in Microsoft Technology Launches
• Part of MS Advisory Boards
You Want the Coolest New
Toys (a.k.a. Technology)
• We eat, sleep, & breathe technology because we love it
• And we have fun with it too…Call us Geeks!
You Want a Trusted Partner
You Enjoy Working With

Why Applied Innovations
7-POINT SECURITY SYSTEM
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Edge Security Router & Firewall
Juniper & Correro Network IPS
Core Security Router & Firewall
Dedicated Firewall
Server-Level Security (Windows Firewall, Trend
Micro AV)
Proactive Monitoring/Reporting
Expert Engineers

MANAGED WINDOWS HOSTING SERVICES
Integrated Management
Immediate Response to
Cluster/Hardware Configuration,
Data Center & Network Issues
Maintain Hardware
Uptime & Provide
Replacements As
Necessary
Network & Server
Monitoring 24x7x365
Maintain Network
Uptime &
Guarantee
Managed
Daily Backup
& Retention
Operating System Patches
& Updates

MANAGED WINDOWS HOSTING SERVICES
Server Concierge Management
System
Administration &
Troubleshooting
DNS
Administration &
Troubleshooting
Mail Server
Admin &
Troubleshooting
SQL Administration
& Troubleshooting
IIS
Administration &
Troubleshooting
All Features of
Integrated Management
Services & Application
Monitoring 24x7x365

Conclusion
What does one second in web performance mean?
Scenario – An ecommerce site making $100,000 per day increases web
performance by one second.
 Increases conversions by 7%
 Increases sales by $2.5 million
A well performing site will positively impact your SEO ranking, allow more people
will find your site, stay on your site, and purchase from your site.
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Questions 43

10-Step Playbook for Online Success

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