Website performance, particularly site speed, is something for foreign operators to consider.
NB: This article is written by Ritesh Gupta, a reporter at Chinatravelnews.
Capturing the attention of a prospective customer early in the booking funnel and converting them is the major objective of any travel e-commerce player, whatever region they operate in. Suppliers and intermediaries alike can’t afford to let conversion rates slip, especially considering the competition for traffic in the online travel sector.
But China poses a significant and distinct conversion challenge to foreign travel companies as a website’s performance can be impacted by local restrictions and localization requirements.
A major factor that foreign websites need to address is the extent to which Google services are blocked in China. Recently, some developers talked up Google’s free font service and its easy installation, not knowing that this product is blocked in China and therefore doesn’t work in the local version of the site.
Other than this, some of the common pain points are jQuery from Google’s content delivery network (CDN) as well as bugs with Facebook, Google and Twitter APIs.
Importantly, all of this adversely affects a site’s performance.
Website accessibility
Acknowledging such hurdles, Jun Lai, general manager, Greater China, Booking.com, says, “We see that some third party content slows down or stops the site loading, hence we remove them so our website are quickly accessible by Chinese customers.”
As website performance is indeed a major issue in China, the end-user experience needs to be constantly monitored.
Lai continues:
"I believe website performance, particularly site speed, is something foreign operators need to consider. We carefully review this issue relating to the locations of the servers, the server speed, the richness of content, the way the website is constructed for different search engines, all to ensure the performance of our website is optimized for the Chinese bookers."
Key considerations
Several factors needs to be taken care of while working on the local version of foreign websites. For starters, language, time zone, user-experience design such as basic date and time formats all need to be localised.
Deciding what services to source locally and how to coordinate with the teams working outside China is also important. In hospitality hotel managers at the property level need to work with corporate offices domestically and internationally while designers, engineers, e-commerce specialists are among the disciplines which need to work cohesively across borders.
So how can a foreign travel business ensure that it is operating at peak efficiency in the world's biggest travel market?
Booking.com's Lai explains:
"We look at this both from a technical perspective and commercial considerations," identifying the two most relevant benchmarks - speed and content
Speed
"We employ various technology to ensure our site speed is optimized so Chinese customers can easily access our products in China and from around the world. This includes the locations of our servers and the support from our network partners for faster page loads"
Content
"The team is always experimenting with content... We work daily to improve localization based on the results from our tests with Chinese users. One example is we changed our search box to display clickable selections of the most popular destinations, instead of typing in."
Still the going isn’t easy.
Last year, a source at a leading metasearch site pointed out that overall, internet speed in China is quite poor.
"Overcoming this was a relatively slow process that involved purchasing additional content delivery network (CDN) services dedicated to the market and ensuring that we complied with all the local regulations."
Lai agreed:
"Site speed is impacted by many factors, including the location of the servers, the server speed, the richness of content and the user's own connection. We monitor our site performance ourselves and work with third-party monitoring services as well."
He added that a fast and reliable service was also important for its hotel suppliers.
"In a recent case we removed a blocked content and it resulted in a much faster extranet for our property partners."
Prioritize
By testing and focusing on sustained improvement, foreign travel brands execute plans more efficiently. As Lai has said, booking.com looks at anything and everything that impacts the site's performance.
"The tests have seen that our page load speed is as fast as some local players,” said Lai, proving that it is possible for overseas travel sites to match domestic operators."
NB: This is an article written by Ritesh Gupta, a reporter from Chinatravelnews.
NB2:China keyboard image by Shutterstock.