Sephora Doubles App Speed in International Market

Sephora has been a pioneer in adopting new mobile technologies both online and in its stores. The Sephora app helps consumers discover new products, make purchases, gain access to the retailer's Beauty Pass rewards program, and explore relevant content about beauty trends.

When Sephora decided to launch a new mobile shopping app in the Southeast Asian market, the brand ran into some issues. Latency is a common issue in the area, compromising mobile app performance. PacketZoom’s Mobile Observatory Index reveals that countries like Indonesia and Malaysia experience a relatively high percentage (8.1 percent and 6.6 percent, on average, respectively) of session disruption compared to the U.S. (3.9 percent) and Japan (2.8 percent). Studies have found that consumers will abandon apps with loads times that reach six seconds or more, and a one-second delay in load time can result in a 7 percent drop in conversions.

“Our app relies on image download speed and session continuity for success, so we were exploring solutions to speed up the app's performance and improve its stability,” explains Lorenzo Peracchione, regional director of mobile commerce at Sephora Digital SEA.

To solve these issues, Sephora integrated PacketZoom Mobile Expresslane to improve the performance of its app in Southeast Asia, and as result increase engagement and sales for customers in the region. Sephora is able to monitor and control the dashboard and conduct A/B tests to see the performance of the app with and without PacketZoom.

“PacketZoom helped speed up our app performance significantly,” says Peracchione.

After its integration, Sephora saw immediate results:

• 10 percent increase in image views;
• 70 percent connection rescue;
• the app ran two-times faster across 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi networks; and
• 63 percent of network-driven disconnected sessions were rescued.

“This translates into a much a smoother mobile experience for our customers, which is a key objective,” says Peracchione. “Additionally, we were able to reduce costs on our CDN bills because PacketZoom automatically offloads mobile content caching from the CDN.”

Peracchione says that page speed is something all retailers need to be concentrating on because it's critical to an app’s success.

“Consumers are very demanding, and if an app appears slow, they usually blame it on the app itself, not the network conditions,” explains Peracchione. “They get frustrated and will abandon their session, or sometimes even uninstall the app completely.”

To enable increased sales and customer engagement on mobile websites and apps, retailers need to have fast-loading pages and network stability.