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In Theory, E-Commerce Sites Are Way Too Slow. But Do Customers Care?
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January 25th, 2012
Speed-tuning for retail Web sites may have finally hit a wall. A report released Wednesday (Jan. 25) says Nike, JCPenney, JCrew and Amazon had the fastest retail sites in 2011. But the survey also notes that the most popular and profitable sites are actually slower to load than the average site, because they contain so much content, and that content delivery networks don't actually speed up load times.
In theory, load times of 3 seconds or more should cost retailers half their customers. If that's true, E-tailers should be going out of business. Maybe it's time to dump those theories.
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One Comment | Read In Theory, E-Commerce Sites Are Way Too Slow. But Do Customers Care?
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
January 26th, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I love it when the data in vendor studies directly contradicts the conclusion, and thanks for call it out.
In the case of page load speed, while I am skeptical of the urban legands quantifing the effect of pageload (1 conversion drop per 100ms, etc…), I have seen a number of first hand examples of improved performance directly improving bounce rate and conversion. So my own experience tells me that speed is an important factor in customer experience… I just don’t believe it can be reduced to a simple equation.
I wonder if one of the problems with the data in the study is how tricky it is to measure page load speed as perceived by the user. Many of those sites with very large pages and long load times, are optimized to load asynchronously. So the first screen of content comes in fast, and content below the fold (and many of the scripts, tracking pixels, etc) come in after the fact. So it’s entirely possible that a consumer saw their first page of content in 3 seconds even though it took 9 for the “full” page to load.
If we’re talking about consumer behavior, then we should probably be talking about perceived load times, not measured load times.