It’s a challenge faced by every eCommerce company: how to create a dazzling customer experience that offers both ease of use and a ton of functionality.
Most eCommerce sites accomplish this feat through the use of third-party technologies that provide them with tools and content for a better customer experience (and higher conversion rates).
Third-party technology lets outside solutions providers move data and content between their own servers and those operated by online stores, most often using a type of code known as JavaScript.
Five Common Types of Third-Party Technologies
In its “2018 eCommerce 3rd Party Technology Index1,” eCommerce optimization company Yottaa highlighted five of the most common types of third-party tech solutions:
1. Personalization and Recommendation – Solutions that collect data about customers and use it to create a personalized experience for them, such as by suggesting other products that they might be interested in.
2. Tag Managers – Tag managers are pieces of code running on a website that third parties can use for analysis, tracking, and reporting purposes. They can give eCommerce sites valuable information about things like the effectiveness of remarketing campaigns and details on customer conversions.
3. Customer Reviews – Services like those provided by Turn To, which include things like product Ratings & Reviews, Community Q&A, and visual content like photos and videos. Customer-Generated Content like this aids shoppers in researching their purchases, and provides helpful social proof that can lead to a conversion.
4. Ad Technology – Code that helps gauge the effectiveness of ads that send customers to an eCommerce site, and provides data that can help with optimizing digital ad campaigns.
5. Social Media – This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Having code from the largest social media platforms, like Facebook, is a move designed to make it easy for online shoppers to share products and experiencers with their networks.
The Importance of Page Load Speeds
The use of third-party technology is on the uptick, according to Retail Systems Research (RSR), an eCommerce industry research group. In a study commissioned by Yottaa, RSR found that the average retail website had somewhere between 40 and 60 third-party technologies implemented on its website.
The tradeoff of all of this third-party technology is that it makes web pages load more slowly. And that can be bad news for eCommerce sites.
A 2019 survey of online shoppers conducted by RSR found that more than 90% admitted to leaving an eCommerce site because it loaded slower than expected.2 Additionally, 57% had left a slow eCommerce site and then made a purchase from a competitor.
Third-party technologies are now a necessary element of any eCommerce site’s strategy—there’s no going back. But online stores would be smart to consider their impact on-site operations.
As we’ve pointed out before, site speed doesn’t just affect conversions. A faster website can also deliver better search engine optimization (SEO) results for your business.
TurnTo Is Built For Speed
In its 2019 report on eCommerce third-party technology services3, Yottaa noted that “Customer reviews are particularly complex with large scale databases that need to react quickly and have a significant impact on conversion rate.” In other words, they’re incredibly important to help drive eCommerce transactions on your site.
The company’s report also highlighted that TurnTo garnered a 58% improvement in performance year-over-year by their measurements.
How’d we manage that? By completely rebuilding our four core products—Ratings & Reviews, Community Q&A, Visual Reviews, and Checkout Comments—using an extremely lightweight JavaScript framework for display rendering that’s faster than anyone else’s.
Our JavaScript bundle is the smallest on the market and fully optimized to make sure your pages load quickly.
In the bare-knuckled world of eCommerce, its advantages like the ones offered by TurnTo that can make a significant difference.
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