eBags Journey to Record Sales w/ Improved Performance & Scalability
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This document discusses eBags' journey to record sales during the 2011 holiday season through improved scalability and performance of their website. It describes how eBags tested and optimized their site ahead of major shopping days like Cyber Monday, resulting in sales increases of 45% on Cyber Monday and a record-breaking season overall. Press coverage highlighted eBags' success and how their technical preparations helped them handle high traffic.
![eBags Holiday 2011 Press
A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age Buyers click away as Cyber Monday sales jump 18%
November 28, 2011 November 28, 2011
eBags…said as of 7 p.m. Eastern time that sales were up 45 Online luggage and handbag site eBags also did testing ahead of time to make sure its site
percent over last year, the biggest day in its history. “This could handle Cyber Monday traffic. It saw a record sales day, up 42.5% over last year, says
will be the biggest day of the season, the year and actually Peter Cobb, the site's co-founder.
the history of the company.” [said Mr. Cobb].
Sales on Cyber Monday Jump by Double Digits
November 29, 2011
E-retailers say sales are up as consumers flock online to
snag money-saving deals Handbag and luggage store eBags Inc. said sales on Monday were up 45% as
November 28, 2011 of the early evening. "It will be a pretty substantial increase over last year's all-
time record," said eBags co-founder Peter Cobb.
As of 9 a.m. Central time, specialty retailer eBags.com co-
founder Peter Cobb says sales today were up 33.7% versus
the same time on the Monday following Thanksgiving last year.
U.S. Web Sales Sparkled for Holiday Season
December 30, 2011
Online luggage-seller eBags, Inc. said sales were up 32%
Retailers Tweak Sites to Spur Sales year over year, but didn’t disclose the underlying numbers.
December 23, 2011
eBags spent months fine-tuning its site for the key end-of-year
shopping quarter as it tried to nail down the science of getting Bringing its call center in-house and back to the U.S. helped boost
people to buy more stuff. eBags’ holiday business
January 19, 2012
Over the summer and fall, the Denver-area retailer tested a version
of its site with stars against one without them. After eBags found To eBags’ surprise, the shift actually allowed the retailer to shave about
sales on the new website were 8% higher than on the star-free site, 34% off its customer care expenses because the U.S.-based customer
the company decided to make the ratings system permanent. service representatives were able to resolve customer complaints more
efficiently.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/holiday-readiness-ebags-keynote-121018144544-phpapp02/85/eBags-Journey-to-Record-Sales-w-Improved-Performance-Scalability-9-320.jpg)
![eBags Holiday 2011 Press
A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age Buyers click away as Cyber Monday sales jump 18%
November 28, 2011 November 28, 2011
eBags…said as of 7 p.m. Eastern time that sales were up 45 Online luggage and handbag site eBags also did testing ahead of time to make sure its site
percent over last year, the biggest day in its history. “This could handle Cyber Monday traffic. It saw a record sales day, up 42.5% over last year, says
will be the biggest day of the season, the year and actually Peter Cobb, the site's co-founder.
the history of the company.” [said Mr. Cobb].
“…sales on (Cyber) Monday by Double Digits
Sales on Cyber Monday Jump
E-retailers say sales are up as consumers flock online were up 45%…”
November 29, 2011
to
snag money-saving deals Handbag and luggage store eBags Inc. said sales on Monday were up 45% as
November 28, 2011 of the early evening. "It will be a pretty substantial increase over last year's all-
time record," said eBags co-founder Peter Cobb.
“Holiday season…sales were
As of 9 a.m. Central time, specialty retailer eBags.com co-
founder Peter Cobb says sales today were up 33.7% versus
up 32% year over year…”
the same time on the Monday following Thanksgiving last year.
U.S. Web Sales Sparkled for Holiday Season
December 30, 2011
Online luggage-seller eBags, Inc. said sales were up 32%
Retailers Tweak Sites to Spur Sales year over year, but didn’t disclose the underlying numbers.
December 23, 2011
eBags spent months fine-tuning its site for the key end-of-year
shopping quarter as it tried to nail down the science of getting Bringing its call center in-house and back to the U.S. helped boost
people to buy more stuff. eBags’ holiday business
January 19, 2012
Over the summer and fall, the Denver-area retailer tested a version
of its site with stars against one without them. After eBags found To eBags’ surprise, the shift actually allowed the retailer to shave about
sales on the new website were 8% higher than on the star-free site, 34% off its customer care expenses because the U.S.-based customer
the company decided to make the ratings system permanent. service representatives were able to resolve customer complaints more
efficiently.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/holiday-readiness-ebags-keynote-121018144544-phpapp02/85/eBags-Journey-to-Record-Sales-w-Improved-Performance-Scalability-10-320.jpg)
eBags Journey to Record Sales w/ Improved Performance & Scalability
- 1. Will Your Site Performance Be Naughty or Nice This Holiday Season? eBags’ Journey to Record Sales with Improved Scalability and Performance Keynote Systems and eBags, Inc.
- 2. Today’s Speakers Dave Karow Mike Frazzini Dave Karow is a Senior Product Manager Mike Frazzini is vice president at for Internet Test and Measurement at eBags.com, where he has spent 14 years Keynote Systems. Dave drives the honing the online-only retailer’s Web innovation and development of Keynote presence. Prior to eBags.com, Mike Test Perspective and Keynote LoadPro worked at Kenan Systems/Lucent, products. Prior to Keynote Systems, Dave PricewaterhouseCoopers and elsewhere in held Product Management Positions at software development, IT operations, BMC Software, Marimba, and Remedy transaction processing, security, and e- Corporation. And when he’s not building commerce infrastructure. He holds better Web Load Testing solutions, you can degrees in Computer Information Systems find Dave helping his son build Star Wars and Business/Finance from Regis College. Legos, play soccer or earn a karate orange Mike has logged over 150,000 miles with belt. his Trager brief and laptop case, and he’s is a loyal Denver Broncos fan through good times and bad. 2
- 4. eBags Overview Broadest Competitive Exceptional Proprietary Rich Content Selection Prices Service Products #103 on Internet Retailer Top 500 Led by team of retail, ecommerce and bag industry veterans 48% of revenue from repeat customers ~120 employees located in Greenwood Vital Village, Colorado headquarters Statistics Accelerating financial performance 26.1% year-over-year growth in CY 2011; ~17% YTD growth in 2012 Leadership position in the $20 Singularly focused on bags and related Market Leader billion bag market and is taking accessories market share Multiple categories (Luggage, Handbags, in Attractive Business Cases, Sports and Backpacks) Core Demographic: Female (68%), Category 36-55, $85k+ annual income enable cross-selling 570 brands; greater than 43,000 SKUs Award-winning site with over 2.4 Drop-ship fulfillment capabilities allow for million customer-generated product market leading-selection of brands and Barriers to reviews, over 400 videos, and rich SKUs Entry / content fostering “customer Defensible Extensible ecommerce platform allows for stickiness” easy searching and navigating across Bag Category Proprietary products are highly- thousands of products Ownership rated, have higher gross margin, and Deep relationships with 570+ brands can’t be comparison shopped 4
- 5. Award Winning Site and Products Award Winning Website ● Won Website of the Year in 2011 (Multichannel Merchant) ● Named Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 E-Retailers in 2011 ● Ranked 9th of Top 50 Mobile Sites by The E-Tailing Group Mystery Shopping Study Outdoor Magazine “Gear of the Year” finalist 2010, 2012 Consumer Specialty Gold medal winner 10 straight years (Multichannel Merchant) Named 2010 Navigator award winner for search technology (Endeca) Named 2nd in Best in Search for Internet Retailer top 100 (Fluid 2009 ) Earned 4th out of 100 top online retail sites in Mystery Shopping Study (E- Tailing 2008) Rated 9th out of 300 sites for customer experience (Future Now 2007) Travel Goods Association Community Service Award (TGA 2006) 5
- 6. eBags Offers a Wide Variety of Top Brands and… Our deep relationships with these well- Our breadth of brands is appealing to known brands are a significant brand-conscious and fashion-conscious competitive advantage consumers 6
- 7. Designer Handbags Brand Launches
- 8. The eBags Brand – Private Label Product eBags Private Label Product (PLP) Over 75 models and 300 SKUs is our #1 selling brand ● 90 new SKUs launched in Q4 2011 ● Currently 12% of sales (targeting 15% PLP is “unshoppable” since only by 2013); 60+% YTD growth in 2012 sold via eBags and partners PLP customers are more than twice EXO Hardside 24” Spinner -- as likely to become a repeat finalist for “Gear of the Year” in customer Outside Magazine ● 95.3% of customers would purchase again ● 9.3 Overall Rating (out of 10) ● 75% of styles rated “Best of the Best” by customers Best of the Best: 90+% would buy again & 9.0+ overall customer rating 8
- 9. eBags Holiday 2011 Press A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age Buyers click away as Cyber Monday sales jump 18% November 28, 2011 November 28, 2011 eBags…said as of 7 p.m. Eastern time that sales were up 45 Online luggage and handbag site eBags also did testing ahead of time to make sure its site percent over last year, the biggest day in its history. “This could handle Cyber Monday traffic. It saw a record sales day, up 42.5% over last year, says will be the biggest day of the season, the year and actually Peter Cobb, the site's co-founder. the history of the company.” [said Mr. Cobb]. Sales on Cyber Monday Jump by Double Digits November 29, 2011 E-retailers say sales are up as consumers flock online to snag money-saving deals Handbag and luggage store eBags Inc. said sales on Monday were up 45% as November 28, 2011 of the early evening. "It will be a pretty substantial increase over last year's all- time record," said eBags co-founder Peter Cobb. As of 9 a.m. Central time, specialty retailer eBags.com co- founder Peter Cobb says sales today were up 33.7% versus the same time on the Monday following Thanksgiving last year. U.S. Web Sales Sparkled for Holiday Season December 30, 2011 Online luggage-seller eBags, Inc. said sales were up 32% Retailers Tweak Sites to Spur Sales year over year, but didn’t disclose the underlying numbers. December 23, 2011 eBags spent months fine-tuning its site for the key end-of-year shopping quarter as it tried to nail down the science of getting Bringing its call center in-house and back to the U.S. helped boost people to buy more stuff. eBags’ holiday business January 19, 2012 Over the summer and fall, the Denver-area retailer tested a version of its site with stars against one without them. After eBags found To eBags’ surprise, the shift actually allowed the retailer to shave about sales on the new website were 8% higher than on the star-free site, 34% off its customer care expenses because the U.S.-based customer the company decided to make the ratings system permanent. service representatives were able to resolve customer complaints more efficiently.
- 10. eBags Holiday 2011 Press A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age Buyers click away as Cyber Monday sales jump 18% November 28, 2011 November 28, 2011 eBags…said as of 7 p.m. Eastern time that sales were up 45 Online luggage and handbag site eBags also did testing ahead of time to make sure its site percent over last year, the biggest day in its history. “This could handle Cyber Monday traffic. It saw a record sales day, up 42.5% over last year, says will be the biggest day of the season, the year and actually Peter Cobb, the site's co-founder. the history of the company.” [said Mr. Cobb]. “…sales on (Cyber) Monday by Double Digits Sales on Cyber Monday Jump E-retailers say sales are up as consumers flock online were up 45%…” November 29, 2011 to snag money-saving deals Handbag and luggage store eBags Inc. said sales on Monday were up 45% as November 28, 2011 of the early evening. "It will be a pretty substantial increase over last year's all- time record," said eBags co-founder Peter Cobb. “Holiday season…sales were As of 9 a.m. Central time, specialty retailer eBags.com co- founder Peter Cobb says sales today were up 33.7% versus up 32% year over year…” the same time on the Monday following Thanksgiving last year. U.S. Web Sales Sparkled for Holiday Season December 30, 2011 Online luggage-seller eBags, Inc. said sales were up 32% Retailers Tweak Sites to Spur Sales year over year, but didn’t disclose the underlying numbers. December 23, 2011 eBags spent months fine-tuning its site for the key end-of-year shopping quarter as it tried to nail down the science of getting Bringing its call center in-house and back to the U.S. helped boost people to buy more stuff. eBags’ holiday business January 19, 2012 Over the summer and fall, the Denver-area retailer tested a version of its site with stars against one without them. After eBags found To eBags’ surprise, the shift actually allowed the retailer to shave about sales on the new website were 8% higher than on the star-free site, 34% off its customer care expenses because the U.S.-based customer the company decided to make the ratings system permanent. service representatives were able to resolve customer complaints more efficiently.
- 11. 2011 Holiday Performance & Scalability Results 99.99+% Beat internal Availability performance goals Scaled to handle 32% increase in 3X projected sales YR/YR peak load 11
- 12. 2011 Holiday Performance & Scalability Results (continued) Full Page Download Base Page Download (including 3rd party/ (HTML only) dependent requests) 2.01 0.66 sec 4.93 2.69 sec <HTML> 0.66 sec 4.93 sec 2011 2011 2010 2010 2.01 sec Weekly average 2.69 sec 12
- 13. 2011 Holiday Performance & Scalability Results (continued) 13
- 14. Prepping for Holiday 2011: How We Got Results Performance and Scalability Task Force ● Weekly meetings with rotating focus ● Cross functional Systems and infrastructure Web applications architects and developers Web designers Marketing ● Extensive Keynote report analysis ● Weblog and other monitoring systems report analysis ● Steve Souders books and tools very helpful ● Performance and scalability shared responsibility Most significant aspect of departmental bonus plan for CY11 14
- 15. Prepping for Holiday 2011: How We Got Results (continued) External Load Testing with Keynote LoadPro ● Multiple iterations starting in June ● Multiple iterations after lockdown in late October What makes Load Testing most effective? ● Iteration, and iteration *after* lockdown ● Building scripts with breadth, depth, and reality Extensive weblog mining to create scripts ● Simulate and/or create full back-office load Batch processing Customer Care ERP ● Analysis and correlation across all monitoring systems ● Assess and test failures on each tier 15
- 16. Biggest Gains in 2011 Performance & Scalability Where did the biggest gains come from? Systems and Infrastructure: ~40% ● Servers – Bug in our default BIOS power management settings ● DB Tier Upgrade Web Application: ~35% ● Overhaul of session management ● Continuous Load Testing integrated into SDLC ● Other application optimizations Web Design: ~15% ● Graphics optimizations/CDN upgrade ● Javascript optimizations and minification ● Sprites Marketing: ~10% ● “Partner Pixel” clean-up and optimization 16
- 17. Observations on Mobile Mobile and Tablet are growing fast ● 3X and 2.5X YOY Visits/Rev 12% of mix 2012 Big investment area ● Mobile optimized site ● Application and infrastructure Mobile performance target +1.5 second over desktop 17
- 18. Additional Preparation for 2012 Repeating focus of 2011 Deeper monitoring ● Broader and deeper coverage of monitors ● Streaming Perspective ● Doubled our Keynote monitoring budget Continued platform investment and upgrades Extensive mobile investment and testing ● Improved capabilities to segregate, tune, and scale mobile back-end infrastructure ● Continued partnership with mobile optimization specialist for front-end/usability Keynote behind the firewall Deeper usability/responsive design focus 18
- 19. Holiday season 2012: Are you ready? User performance expectations and mobile commerce forecast Mobile site traffic and Anticipated page load wait sales percentage trends times by device 48% 2 seconds 31% or less 21% 26% 3 seconds 29% 23% 11% 4 seconds 18% 20% 8% 5 seconds 12% 18% 7% 6 seconds 10% or more 18% Laptop / desktop computer Tablet Smartphone / touch phone Source: IBM 5th Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, 2012 Source: Keynote Mobile User Study, 2012 19
- 20. Holiday season 2012: Are you ready? Mobile user performance expectations—a closer look Source: Keynote Mobile User Study, 2012 20
- 21. About Keynote The global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing & monitoring. • Founded May 1995 • Public, NASDAQ: “KEYN” • 4,000 customers • On-demand infrastructure of over 4,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in more than 275 locations around the world • $25 billion in online sales trusted by the Internet’s top retailers to Keynote testing and monitoring 21
- 22. Keynote Web and Mobile Performance Monitoring True user experience, from real Web browsers, mobile devices & networks Web Mobile Web True User Transaction Perspective Mobile Web Perspective (over air) Experience Real Internet Explorer, Firefox browsers 35 mobile networks Uptime Application Perspective Mobile Web Perspective (over LAN) Monitoring Emulated browser 2,100 smartphone and tablet device profiles 22
- 23. Complete monitoring Real-time visibility, immediate notification, diagnostic insight, trend analysis 23
- 24. Keynote Web Load Testing Real-world Internet traffic, realistic tests. Fully outsourced or on-demand. Test Self-service, point-click script LoadPro Managed service; SaaS platform + recorder, guided workflow expert consulting Perspective 20 dedicated, top-tier load delivery 4 dedicated, top-tier load delivery locations locations + additional scalability through public cloud resources Flexible on-demand subscription Pay-as-you-go 24
- 25. Thank you. Q&A Drawing: Stay with us to win a $50 eBags.com gift card! Contact us to set up a free trial, or personalized demo. www.keynote.com 1-800-539-6683 / +49-(0)4106-1280112 keynote.com/kms 25