Cédric and Matthias are respectively e-commerce manager and developer for the company Mademoiselle bio and users of Loadtest, our load testing solution. In this interview, they explain to you how our solution allowed them to multiply by 5 the capacity of their platform and to generate 30% more turnover.
Hello Cédric and Matthias, can you introduce Mademoiselle Bio in a few words?
Since 2006, Mademoiselle Bio has been the reference in certified organic beauty, both on the web and in boutique institutes. Originally a pure player, boutiques in Paris and Bordeaux have complemented our presence over the years
.What are your challenges on the WebÂ?
The web is a major channel, just because of the story of Mademoiselle Bio.
It is also a place of strong competition and growth, in a market that is still young and innovative.
We have two highlights per year, these important campaigns can multiply our traffic by 6. We also have smaller operations (shorter or on a limited number of brands) that take place about once a month and which still generate significant
increases in traffic.During the lockdown period, we also launched new operations, which in particular allowed us to record our historic peak in traffic.
What place do you give to the customer experience on your website?
It is essential for us to provide expertise and advice on the web. It is the link with our boutique institutes, it is our identity and our added value. This expertise is closely linked to the customer experience. This involves easily and quickly accessible content, clearly identified paths, research aids or even means of communication such as chat or social networks
.You decided to use load testing, why
? What were your problemsÂ
?We started like everyone else, with a small site. The technical construction of our infrastructure was carried out in line with our traffic evolutions. At the beginning, we upgraded our servers to increase the capacity of the platform and limited ourselves to brief optimizations of
our code.Subsequently, we had problems identifying the moment when the site became unavailable and identifying the optimizations to be made throughout the year and especially before our periods of strategic activity.
Last problemÂ: we did not have a pre-production platform eligible for load tests. It was not possible to do the tests directly on our production environment. The risk of impacting our real order tunnel and losing turnover was too great.
Do you recognize yourself in these problems? Contact us to schedule a demo. Together, let's improve the quality of your site and the experience of your users
.What do you expect from a load test Â?
Our objective was to be able to measure the capacity of the platform, to know precisely the corrections to be made and to be able to anticipate malfunctions. Test the functionalities and precisely measure their impacts on the site and loading performance.
We don't want to go too far too fast and keep an infrastructure consistent with our project and our traffic estimates.Also, we place a great deal on the human side and our desire was to find a partner with whom to talk, not just to receive a report with the state of affairs of our platform. We wanted tests, to understand what was going on after these tests, to be able to discuss and understand the optimizations to be made. We don't have that advanced technical knowledge, and that's
not our aim.In other words, we wanted to gain peace of mind.
 It is important to remember that it is more effective to test the capabilities of the website regularly than once a year before a potential traffic peak. This makes it possible to judge the different evolutions of TMA and applications and to more easily identify the origin of the anomalies.” Jérôme CALAIS, General Manager at Netvigie. “
How does a load test project with Netvigie work in concrete terms
?We have identified two reference scenarios. The first concerned a navigation path and the second a navigation path with entry into the control tunnel
.
We collected our order funnel entry rate in our Analytics tool. This information was used to determine the number of users to simulate on our platform while remaining consistent with our
business.Then, we worked jointly with a Netvigie project manager to set up a platform similar to pre-production to perform load tests and understand the capacity of the platform.
Everything was done very simply and with a lot of flexibility. Then we didn't have to do anything.
What anomalies were you able to detect thanks to the load test Â?
The first shot (duration 50 min) simulating 500 users simultaneously on the site revealed that our routes fell into error in 69% and 91% of cases respectively for the navigation and navigation + checkout paths.
We identified bottlenecks at all levels, confirming our intuitions. We were convinced that we had a database bottleneck that brought our platform down. The problem actually came from the distribution and functioning of our base. We also realized that as our site evolved, we had complicated our
project.We have also detected micro-problems that in reality are of great importance in the accessibility of our platform. This was the case with our facet engine for example. We knew it was a greedy feature but weren't aware of its
impact.It is important to note that during the promotion period, the user's behavior changes. They see more pages, add more products to the cart. We have learned that going from 4 to 6 products added to the basket has an impact on the number of queries. In itself this is not a problem, but multiplied by the number of Internet users, repercussions are noted on the base
.Then two more shots were fired.
The return was an important point for you. How did this stage with the Netvigie team go?
We had a very complete pdf report detailing the entire history of the project. What is interesting is to see where we started and where we could get to with some corrective actions. In addition, we were able to talk to our project manager in person about each of the points in the report. We were also able to send this document to our outsourcer, Netvigie positioning itself
as a trusted third party.At the end of the first load test, we carried out a second one with 2,000 users but the error rate was still too high with 42% for the browsing scenario and 31% for the checkout.
A final load test made it possible to set the platform's capacity to 1200 users (900 on navigation and 300 on the checkout with error rates of 5% and 3% respectively
.Â
What optimizations did you make to improve the capacity of your platformÂ
?Some of the recommendations were applied during lockdown.
With the help of our dedicated project manager at Netvigie, we implemented a load balancing solution in order to better distribute the traffic on our various servers.
We worked on our facet engine by integrating the DooFinder solution. This Saas tool allows you to integrate into the site and replace the search engine. The number of requests is limited with an advantage in terms of loading times and user experience
.Other quick wins are still in the works, such as the addition of a script to solve our problem of adding to the cart by emptying all the baskets abandoned for more than 90 days.
In your opinion, what are the benefits of a load test? Â
We have seen better performance of our platform compared to our previous traffic peaks.
Our site experienced its historic peak of attendance during the lockdown period. This represents 30% more load compared to our usual peaks, and thanks to the Loadtest and the resulting optimizations, our platform withstood the shock. It is a security for our online business.
We estimated a traffic range beyond which our site fell. The shots confirmed this and also taught us that with a few optimizations we could go further. We have gained in quality and have secured our turnover!
Excluding our marketing investments and focusing only on our gain in terms of loading performance, load tests allowed us to generate 30% more sales compared to year N-1.
What other gains did you notice?
We chose to work with Netvigie because we were looking for a partner we could trust and establish a real relationship. The feedback stage was an important variable in our decision making. Our Netvigie project manager supported us throughout the project to help us and
answer our questions.It was decisive to be able to talk with people who understood our needs, e-commerce and our technical stack. This makes it possible to go further than a purely technical analysis, by integrating behavioral variables.
Any advice to give to your colleagues to secure their online activity?
Test practice. Make a regular inventory, analyze, modify and test again. Never think it's won, the smallest grain of sand can quickly cause the whole machine to go haywire...
