Yottaa Boosts Site Speed, Sales For eCommerce

Waltham, Massachusetts-based eCommerce solutions company Yottaa has made a big splash in the commerce space in the past few years. Its SaaS platform for accelerating eCommerce has been picked up by major retailers, including Puma, eBags, King Arthur Flour, Jo-Ann Fabric and Moosejaw, to name a few. Yottaa currently works with 100 retailers across 700 eCommerce sites.

“We’ve been in the market with a product for about three years with an amazing, forward-thinking customer base,” said CEO Rich Stendardo. “When we think of this technology, we think of it as the next important enabling technology in the eCommerce stack.”

Stendardo said that an issue many online retailers are facing is a major slowdown in retail website rendering on desktop and mobile. “Think back a few years ago. A website was something that was largely controlled by the retailer working within their commerce platform to try to create a good customer experience,” he said. “What has happened over the last five years is that there’s been a proliferation of third-party services that retailers are investing in.”

These services can include anything from review services, social media integration and online chat services, to hi-res images and complicated JavaScript. Today, Stendardo said, the average retail site renders in about five seconds on desktop. Mobile devices take an average of eight seconds to load.

While that may sound just fine to anyone who had to deal with the glacial pace of dial-up back in the day, Stendardo said industry research shows that five to eight seconds isn’t good enough for today’s consumer.

“As the ecosystem gets more and more complex, accumulating more and more of these services over time, they become heavier and heavier,” he said. “Shoppers expect their retail sites to render in three seconds. But if the page doesn’t appear and start to engage them in three seconds, then they start to leave.” And with them goes their revenue.

That’s where Yottaa comes in. “We’re giving retailers the opportunity to regain control of their site and to be able to, with that control, speed up the site itself,” said Stendardo. “We provide the tools and services to improve their performance.”

The alternative, said Stendardo, is for retailers to put their site on a diet. “They start taking stuff off of their site, which is just insanity. It’s the bury-your-head-in-the-sand methodology.”

Stendardo said that, with the use of Yottaa’s platform, retailers will see a 30–80 percent improvement in web page performance. “Sites that took 13 seconds before using our platform are now rendering in five seconds,” he said. “That’s not an unusual improvement following deployment of our technology.”

As the load time improves, so does the website’s conversion rate. “A one-second improvement in performance can increase a website’s conversion rate by 7 percent. That’s a huge number for an eCommerce retailer or a B2B distributor.”

And it doesn’t take much on the part of retailers, and the results can be dramatic. “We get customers up and into production in two weeks. It can have an immediate impact on the performance of their site and on their sales.”

One of Yottaa’s clients, online retailer eBags, recently said it had seen a 30 percent improvement in its website’s performance and a 10 percent increase in conversion rates for mobile devices since deploying the acceleration platform.

Yottaa recently raised an additional $13 million in funding led by Stata Venture Partners. Stendardo said that Yottaa plans to use the funds to grow all of its operations. “We’re taking this next round of funding to scale all parts of the company,” said Stendardo. “We’re going to continue to innovate on the product and realize a broader footprint. Yottaa has been the best-kept secret in business for far too long. It’s a bit of a coming-out party now.”