E-business infrastructure Bandwidth Retailers download the latest price lists and promotional infor-
164
A major factor for a company to consider when choosing an ISP is whether the server is dedi- cated to one company or whether content from several companies is located on the same
server. A dedicated server is best, but it will attract a premium price.
Availability
The availability of a web site is an indication of how easy it is for a user to connect to it. In theory this figure should be 100 per cent, but sometimes, for technical reasons such as fail-
ures in the server hardware or upgrades to software, the figure can drop substantially below this. Box 3.8 illustrates some of the potential problems and how companies can evaluate and
address them.
Box 3.8
Preventing wobbly shopping carts
Table 3.5
Web site Average download speed
Page size
1 Thomas Cook
4.65 s 18.46 kb
2 British Airways
5.15 s 23.46 kb
3 Next On-Line Shopping
5.64 s 26.90 kb
4 easyJet
6.09 s 27.88 kb
5 NTL
6.66 s 29.77 kb
95 Nokia UK
37.60 s 180.98 kb
96 The Salvation Army
37.68 s 171.07 kb
97 Rail Track
38.14 s 111.00 kb
98 workthing.com
38.77 s 187.35 kb
99 Orange
40.01 s 194.16 kb
100 FT.com
44.39 s 211.55 kb
Source: Site Confidence www.siteconfidence.co.uk
Variation in download speed for a 56.6 kbps modem and page size for the top five and bottom five UK sites week starting 6 October 2005
Part 1 Introduction
The extent of the problem of e-commerce service levels was indicated by The Register 2004 in an article titled ‘Wobbly shopping carts blight UK e-commerce’. The research
showed that failure of transactions once customers have decided to buy is often a problem. As the article said, ‘UK E-commerce sites are slapping customers in the face,
rather than shaking them by the hand. Turning consumers away once they have made a decision to buy is commercial suicide.’ The research showed this level of problems:
ix
20 of shopping carts did not function for 12 hours a month or more.
x
75 failed the standard service level availability of 99.9 uptime.
xi
80 performed inconsistently with widely varying response times, time-outs and errors – leaving customers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable
to complete their purchases.
Similarly, SciVisum, a web testing specialist found that three-quarters of Internet marketing campaigns are impacted by web site failures, with 14 per cent of failures so
severe that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company
Service-level agreements
To ensure the best speed and availability a company should check the
service-level agreements SLAs
carefully when outsourcing web site hosting services. The SLA will define confirmed standards of availability and performance measured in terms of the latency or network delay
when information is passed from one point to the next such as London to New York. The SLA also includes notification to the customer detailing when the web service becomes unavailable
with reasons why and estimates of when the service will be restored. Further information on SLAs is available at
www.uk.uu.netsupportsla
.
Security
Security is another important issue in service quality. How to control security was referred to in the earlier section on firewalls and is considered in detail in the Focus on security
design Chapter 11, p. 652.
Managing employee access to the Internet and e-mail
This is covered in Chapter 11 in the Focus on e-business security section.
Managing e-business applications infrastructure
Management of the
e-business applications infrastructure
concerns delivering the right applications to all users of e-business services. The issue involved is one that has long been a
concern of IS managers, namely to deliver access to integrated applications and data that are available across the whole company. Traditionally businesses have developed applications
silos or islands of information, as depicted in Figure 3.17a. This shows that these silos may
165
surveyed marketing professionals from 100 UK-based organizations across the retail, financial, travel and online gaming sectors. More than a third of failures were rated as
‘serious to severe’, with many customers complaining or unable to complete web transactions. These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are
owned by others in the business, but marketers need to ask the right questions. The SciVisum 2005 research showed that nearly two-thirds of marketing professionals did
not know how many users making transactions their web sites could support, despite an average transaction value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into
campaign plans. Thirty-seven per cent could not put a monetary value on losses caused by customers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organizations experi-
enced web site overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication between the two departments.
SciVisum recommends that companies do the following:
1
Define the peak visitor throughput requirements for each customer journey on the site. For example, the site should be able to support at the same time: approxi-
mately ten checkout journeys per second, thirty add-to-basket journeys per second, five registration journeys per second, two check-my-order-status journeys
per second.
2
Service-level agreement. More detailed technical requirements need to be agreed for each of the transactions stages. Home-page delivery time and server uptime
are insufficiently detailed.
3
Set up a monitoring programme that measures and reports on the agreed journeys 247.