November 7, 2006
Four Seconds Too Long for Online Shoppers
High prices and delivery costs are tops when it comes to turning off online shoppers but other factors such as the time it takes a Web page to load are important if retailers want to turn browsers into buyers.
Based on a new study conducted by JupiterResearch for Akamai Technologies, the average online shopper gets antsy enough to consider abandoning a Web site if a page takes four seconds to load.
“The critical takeaway from this research is that online shoppers not only demand quality site performance, they expect it,” said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing at Akamai, in a press release. “Four seconds is the new benchmark by which a retail site will be judged, which leaves little room for error for retailers to maintain a loyal online customer base. Site performance becomes even more critical as retailers add more dynamic content and applications to their site.”
A Web site that does not perform up to shopper expectations can have both short and long-term consequences. According to the research, one-third of shoppers will abandon a site if performance is slow. Seventy-five percent of those are unlikely to ever attempt to shop at the Web site again.
With traffic increasing to e-commerce sites as the holidays approach, performance becomes increasingly critical. Of the top 500 sites identified by Internet Retailer, close to
half report pages taking more than four seconds to load.
Discussion Questions: Is site performance as big an issue as suggested in the JupiterResearch study? What do you see as the biggest reasons for consumers
to abandon carts online? Will consumer expectations for site performance become more flexible as traffic builds in the run-up to the holidays and during the season?
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I think it’s important not to forget about ease of use in favor of speed. One page that takes 1.5 seconds (or even, heaven forbid, 3 seconds) is a lot quicker and more painless than having to view 8 pages to accomplish the same thing, no matter how quickly they load. Sites that can do both are the ones that shoppers remember – and come back to visit again.
The Jupiter study misses the key point. Yes, online shoppers get antsy with slow page loading, particularly at the product level. But the bigger point is that most online shoppers want to evaluate a number of items before they drill down into a particular SKU. Shopper antsy-ness is not about a single page load. The concern is about having to endure multiple loads of product pages in order to get their shopping done. And like everything in retail, it relates to the classification. For unique, in-demand merchandise, they’ll tolerate a few more seconds. For commodity goods, they won’t.
Online retailers need to present pages with lightning speed on which multiple SKUs can be viewed. If possible, let the customer make their own selection with powerful search capability. Thumbnails are important to orient shoppers visually. Show comparisons to assist them to get clear. You are in a battle for their time.
Feedback is essential. Can you track how long it takes for the page to load? What your online conversion rate? Does the rate correlate to load time? Can you correlate online click stream activity to in-store traffic? Consumer studies suggest that, in some categories, many of your new, in-store customers have pre-selected merchandise after visiting your web site. You must track both in-store and online behavior to get it right.
On line retailers are divided into two camps, those who offer items within categories and those who offer a shopping experience.
Those in the “category/item camp” work very hard to ensure that a shopper can zero in on the exact item they are looking for within a category as quickly as possible and provide them the tools that they need to make their decision on that item. This camp is made up of the preponderance of online retailers
Those in the “experience camp” are rarefied indeed. I can think of only a hand full who excel and do so through predictive technology which is obtained as a result of shoppers previous purchases within their site. Amazon is just such an example, they offer both standard suggestions of additional product based upon macro trends as well as more specific selections based upon the micro trends made up of your historical purchases.
If a site can provide you with reasons for staying on line and browsing then they can become a destination unto themselves. This will build both average cart value and frequency of shopping.
If they cannot, then they will continue to be focused on delivering an item or two as fast as possible and compete with every other “item” retailer.
Camille makes a great point in that dedicated online shoppers will hold all sites to the highest (fastest?) comparative standard. But there is always a possibility that we are “saluting the tallest midget” in this sort of research. Said another way, there may be a dramatic reaction to a stimulus that is, in reality, of relatively little import to the decision being evaluated. In this case, experienced online shoppers reacting very negatively to slower page downloads might be dwarfed in importance to their actual behavior by ease of site navigation or relevance of merchandise offered. That being said, if all else is equal between two competing sites (Re: Camille’s point) faster page loads wins.
It would seem that everything has been covered rather well. My only remaining pet peeve is to find a retailer advertising a very reasonable price only to find that shipping and handling charges are ten times the norm. This wastes consumers’ time and produces few, if any, satisfied customers. Who ever came up with this “marketing tactic”?
As with bricks-and-mortar, shoppers always pay with three currencies:
* Money
* Time
* Angst
These three interact, and are well discussed above. On the time issue, it is a matter of the speed with which your eyes and nervous system, including the brain, can respond. This is what makes reading such a super communication methodology – the brain can be fed content at the exact speed that it is able to make use of it. And it can move forward and back with great facility.
Four seconds itself is marginally abusive to the reader/page viewer. The actual amount of time it takes for an exposure to make an impression is between 0.75 and 1.0 second. An “exposure” shorter than that may have a subliminal impact, but it will not be sufficient to consciously register.
This means that 2 and 3 seconds begins to be a L – O – N – G time for someone searching for information. Don’t be surprised by this. It works in bricks-and-mortar as well as in the online world.
In a recent full-shopping-trip eye tracking study, we saw the tremendous movement of the gaze point as shoppers pursued their trip. Mixing this with page-loading from online, it is obvious that any page requiring four seconds to load might as well not load at all – it is just an impediment to be avoided by the shopper.
This is the good news/bad news the industry needs to come to grips with. A five minute shopping trip represents tremendous opportunity to sell. But unless you get serious about the shopper’s time, you won’t win.
Unfortunately, merchants are obsessed with price as the way to move a shopper. It’s a heck of a lot easier (and lazier) to try to buy a sale with a lower price, than to understand the process in detail, and know how the shopper will reward you with more money if you will charge them less time and angst.
The reason online shoppers expect sites to load quickly is because many do. The reason online shoppers expect to browse through items quickly is because they can at many sites. The reason online shoppers expect to check out quickly is because they can at other sites. Whatever positive experiences online shoppers encounter at some sites is what they begin to “expect” at other sites.
If other sites offer the experience online shoppers want, that’s where they will go unless they can’t find what they want.
Research demonstrates that consumers will leave the site when frustrated. Other research demonstrates that if consumers leave an online site, most consumers will also not go back to the brick and mortar store from that site either.
Consumers’ patience during the holidays grows shorter, not more forgiving. If the sites don’t meet consumer expectations, the retailer stands to lose.
We’re an “instant gratification” generation and I can certainly believe that large numbers of shoppers will abandon a site if it’s slow. As well, a large number of online retailers, with fancy graphics & animation have forgotten that many households still have dial-up speed, which makes loading time an eternity. In addition to taking connection speed into account in their design/tech set up, I also think online retailers that focus on ease of page navigation plus ability to comparison shop & research before zeroing into a specific choice are providing shoppers important online attributes that translate to higher purchase.
At the end of forty seconds, not four, my interest in reading the intelligent comments above started to wane. I guess that means quick, interesting site performance is an issue with me. I guess I’m not an addicted Dude of the Digital Age…but then I’m only one consumer.
In retail, the brand is the experience. This is particularly true for online. Of course, the time it takes from click until the page paints is an important part of the experience. However, I might contend that this is blown a little out of proportion by not showing it in relation to other crimes and misdemeanors. My guess is that the list might start with: not getting the thing you bought; then would be entering your credit card and not having the response page load so you don’t know if you actually bought the thing. Then, being on the site and not having a page load so you can’t navigate. On a list such as this, I assume, taking 4 seconds for a page to load would be an annoyance, but relatively small potatoes.
Brick-and-mortar retailers have spent plenty of time and money redesigning their stores to improve ease of navigation and checkout speed. As I mentioned in another comment last week, consumers have been trained by their experience with online shopping to expect nothing less from brick-and mortar.
So the consumer who gravitates the most to online shopping will naturally be the most impatient if the site in question doesn’t move lightning-fast. Especially in today’s world of faster broadband and wireless speeds plus more powerful processors and servers…there is no excuse for an online retailer to function at the speed of dial-up. At the same time, online retailers should continue paying close attention to their site design and ease of navigation, not just the transaction speed within the site.
“Yes,” site performance is critical and “No” frustrated people will not become more tolerant by the holidays. If anything, it’s likely that site performance will become a more critical factor.
Nice job by Akamai to create an advertisement packaged as research. However, they do make a valid point about the need for web sites to be efficient.
Too many retailers build their web sites based on what technology can do instead of building it based on what the customer wants to do. Flash movies and other bandwidth-hogging features are cool and typically run great on the executive’s broadband connection at their office. Unfortunately, some of their customers are struggling to try to get past those same features, so they can make a purchase.
The work has to be done upfront to design the online experience from the customer’s point of view and help them find the items they need and get to the checkout as efficiently as possible. That includes not only page load times, but also things like page layout so that the customer doesn’t need to scroll, and easy navigation among pages.
The reason shoppers shop online is for convenience, speed and ease. If a site takes a “long time,” and for each of us that might be a different length of time, it can have a negative impact on the sales. Speed and convenience is a major factor of the overall Customer Experience. We all know that a negative customer experience leads to a decline in sales. So whether 4 seconds is too long or 10 seconds is too long, the designers and architects of the web sites must be sensitive to those of us who have either less broadband or slower computers.
Well said Herb.
Money, time and angst is a powerful way at looking at customer payment; for all channels.
Everyone is aware of the three, but they’re most often viewed as unconnected silos.
It’s so true that every customer comes to a site with a limited budget in all three accounts.
It also holds true that customers are more likely to flow more into the money account when the time and angst accounts are tapped the least, supporting Walsh’s “experience” comment.
A good example is Zappos.com Good site performance and navigation, Shop by size (what else makes sense when shoe shopping?), Huge assortment, Free Shipping Both Ways, 365-Day Return Policy and 110% Price Protection.
They’ve taken away every major customer excuse for NOT shopping there. And if you actually research the prices, they’re not always the lowest price, but they gain the perception that they are with 110% price protection. Brilliant.
Agreed Bernice.
“The #1 customer service is to be in stock” – Sam Walton
If the customer can’t walk away with what they came for, the most wonderful customer service experience imaginable is still for naught.
All the slick, smart, fast navigation in the world is useless if you spend time shopping, choosing, giving payment details etc and then find out that the item isn’t available. If the technology and guys behind the scenes are that savvy (and please forgive me for using what has now become the most hateful word in my business vocabulary) they should say so when the item is first displayed. Or better yet, get it off the screen until it’s back in stock.
Far too many sites are designed ignoring the dial-up audience. Millions of people still use dial-up, not broadband. Animation and other complications aren’t appreciated if you have to wait and wait for the features to load. Many people use the internet to save time. Making it complicated wastes time. Many auto manufacturer sites use extensive animation. How many people need to see the car move? If they see a static picture, will they believe it can move? Or do they need proof?
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I think it’s important not to forget about ease of use in favor of speed. One page that takes 1.5 seconds (or even, heaven forbid, 3 seconds) is a lot quicker and more painless than having to view 8 pages to accomplish the same thing, no matter how quickly they load. Sites that can do both are the ones that shoppers remember – and come back to visit again.
The Jupiter study misses the key point. Yes, online shoppers get antsy with slow page loading, particularly at the product level. But the bigger point is that most online shoppers want to evaluate a number of items before they drill down into a particular SKU. Shopper antsy-ness is not about a single page load. The concern is about having to endure multiple loads of product pages in order to get their shopping done. And like everything in retail, it relates to the classification. For unique, in-demand merchandise, they’ll tolerate a few more seconds. For commodity goods, they won’t.
Online retailers need to present pages with lightning speed on which multiple SKUs can be viewed. If possible, let the customer make their own selection with powerful search capability. Thumbnails are important to orient shoppers visually. Show comparisons to assist them to get clear. You are in a battle for their time.
Feedback is essential. Can you track how long it takes for the page to load? What your online conversion rate? Does the rate correlate to load time? Can you correlate online click stream activity to in-store traffic? Consumer studies suggest that, in some categories, many of your new, in-store customers have pre-selected merchandise after visiting your web site. You must track both in-store and online behavior to get it right.
On line retailers are divided into two camps, those who offer items within categories and those who offer a shopping experience.
Those in the “category/item camp” work very hard to ensure that a shopper can zero in on the exact item they are looking for within a category as quickly as possible and provide them the tools that they need to make their decision on that item. This camp is made up of the preponderance of online retailers
Those in the “experience camp” are rarefied indeed. I can think of only a hand full who excel and do so through predictive technology which is obtained as a result of shoppers previous purchases within their site. Amazon is just such an example, they offer both standard suggestions of additional product based upon macro trends as well as more specific selections based upon the micro trends made up of your historical purchases.
If a site can provide you with reasons for staying on line and browsing then they can become a destination unto themselves. This will build both average cart value and frequency of shopping.
If they cannot, then they will continue to be focused on delivering an item or two as fast as possible and compete with every other “item” retailer.
Camille makes a great point in that dedicated online shoppers will hold all sites to the highest (fastest?) comparative standard. But there is always a possibility that we are “saluting the tallest midget” in this sort of research. Said another way, there may be a dramatic reaction to a stimulus that is, in reality, of relatively little import to the decision being evaluated. In this case, experienced online shoppers reacting very negatively to slower page downloads might be dwarfed in importance to their actual behavior by ease of site navigation or relevance of merchandise offered. That being said, if all else is equal between two competing sites (Re: Camille’s point) faster page loads wins.
It would seem that everything has been covered rather well. My only remaining pet peeve is to find a retailer advertising a very reasonable price only to find that shipping and handling charges are ten times the norm. This wastes consumers’ time and produces few, if any, satisfied customers. Who ever came up with this “marketing tactic”?
As with bricks-and-mortar, shoppers always pay with three currencies:
* Money
* Time
* Angst
These three interact, and are well discussed above. On the time issue, it is a matter of the speed with which your eyes and nervous system, including the brain, can respond. This is what makes reading such a super communication methodology – the brain can be fed content at the exact speed that it is able to make use of it. And it can move forward and back with great facility.
Four seconds itself is marginally abusive to the reader/page viewer. The actual amount of time it takes for an exposure to make an impression is between 0.75 and 1.0 second. An “exposure” shorter than that may have a subliminal impact, but it will not be sufficient to consciously register.
This means that 2 and 3 seconds begins to be a L – O – N – G time for someone searching for information. Don’t be surprised by this. It works in bricks-and-mortar as well as in the online world.
In a recent full-shopping-trip eye tracking study, we saw the tremendous movement of the gaze point as shoppers pursued their trip. Mixing this with page-loading from online, it is obvious that any page requiring four seconds to load might as well not load at all – it is just an impediment to be avoided by the shopper.
This is the good news/bad news the industry needs to come to grips with. A five minute shopping trip represents tremendous opportunity to sell. But unless you get serious about the shopper’s time, you won’t win.
Unfortunately, merchants are obsessed with price as the way to move a shopper. It’s a heck of a lot easier (and lazier) to try to buy a sale with a lower price, than to understand the process in detail, and know how the shopper will reward you with more money if you will charge them less time and angst.
The reason online shoppers expect sites to load quickly is because many do. The reason online shoppers expect to browse through items quickly is because they can at many sites. The reason online shoppers expect to check out quickly is because they can at other sites. Whatever positive experiences online shoppers encounter at some sites is what they begin to “expect” at other sites.
If other sites offer the experience online shoppers want, that’s where they will go unless they can’t find what they want.
Research demonstrates that consumers will leave the site when frustrated. Other research demonstrates that if consumers leave an online site, most consumers will also not go back to the brick and mortar store from that site either.
Consumers’ patience during the holidays grows shorter, not more forgiving. If the sites don’t meet consumer expectations, the retailer stands to lose.
We’re an “instant gratification” generation and I can certainly believe that large numbers of shoppers will abandon a site if it’s slow. As well, a large number of online retailers, with fancy graphics & animation have forgotten that many households still have dial-up speed, which makes loading time an eternity. In addition to taking connection speed into account in their design/tech set up, I also think online retailers that focus on ease of page navigation plus ability to comparison shop & research before zeroing into a specific choice are providing shoppers important online attributes that translate to higher purchase.
At the end of forty seconds, not four, my interest in reading the intelligent comments above started to wane. I guess that means quick, interesting site performance is an issue with me. I guess I’m not an addicted Dude of the Digital Age…but then I’m only one consumer.
In retail, the brand is the experience. This is particularly true for online. Of course, the time it takes from click until the page paints is an important part of the experience. However, I might contend that this is blown a little out of proportion by not showing it in relation to other crimes and misdemeanors. My guess is that the list might start with: not getting the thing you bought; then would be entering your credit card and not having the response page load so you don’t know if you actually bought the thing. Then, being on the site and not having a page load so you can’t navigate. On a list such as this, I assume, taking 4 seconds for a page to load would be an annoyance, but relatively small potatoes.
Brick-and-mortar retailers have spent plenty of time and money redesigning their stores to improve ease of navigation and checkout speed. As I mentioned in another comment last week, consumers have been trained by their experience with online shopping to expect nothing less from brick-and mortar.
So the consumer who gravitates the most to online shopping will naturally be the most impatient if the site in question doesn’t move lightning-fast. Especially in today’s world of faster broadband and wireless speeds plus more powerful processors and servers…there is no excuse for an online retailer to function at the speed of dial-up. At the same time, online retailers should continue paying close attention to their site design and ease of navigation, not just the transaction speed within the site.
“Yes,” site performance is critical and “No” frustrated people will not become more tolerant by the holidays. If anything, it’s likely that site performance will become a more critical factor.
Nice job by Akamai to create an advertisement packaged as research. However, they do make a valid point about the need for web sites to be efficient.
Too many retailers build their web sites based on what technology can do instead of building it based on what the customer wants to do. Flash movies and other bandwidth-hogging features are cool and typically run great on the executive’s broadband connection at their office. Unfortunately, some of their customers are struggling to try to get past those same features, so they can make a purchase.
The work has to be done upfront to design the online experience from the customer’s point of view and help them find the items they need and get to the checkout as efficiently as possible. That includes not only page load times, but also things like page layout so that the customer doesn’t need to scroll, and easy navigation among pages.
The reason shoppers shop online is for convenience, speed and ease. If a site takes a “long time,” and for each of us that might be a different length of time, it can have a negative impact on the sales. Speed and convenience is a major factor of the overall Customer Experience. We all know that a negative customer experience leads to a decline in sales. So whether 4 seconds is too long or 10 seconds is too long, the designers and architects of the web sites must be sensitive to those of us who have either less broadband or slower computers.
Well said Herb.
Money, time and angst is a powerful way at looking at customer payment; for all channels.
Everyone is aware of the three, but they’re most often viewed as unconnected silos.
It’s so true that every customer comes to a site with a limited budget in all three accounts.
It also holds true that customers are more likely to flow more into the money account when the time and angst accounts are tapped the least, supporting Walsh’s “experience” comment.
A good example is Zappos.com Good site performance and navigation, Shop by size (what else makes sense when shoe shopping?), Huge assortment, Free Shipping Both Ways, 365-Day Return Policy and 110% Price Protection.
They’ve taken away every major customer excuse for NOT shopping there. And if you actually research the prices, they’re not always the lowest price, but they gain the perception that they are with 110% price protection. Brilliant.
Agreed Bernice.
“The #1 customer service is to be in stock” – Sam Walton
If the customer can’t walk away with what they came for, the most wonderful customer service experience imaginable is still for naught.
All the slick, smart, fast navigation in the world is useless if you spend time shopping, choosing, giving payment details etc and then find out that the item isn’t available. If the technology and guys behind the scenes are that savvy (and please forgive me for using what has now become the most hateful word in my business vocabulary) they should say so when the item is first displayed. Or better yet, get it off the screen until it’s back in stock.
Far too many sites are designed ignoring the dial-up audience. Millions of people still use dial-up, not broadband. Animation and other complications aren’t appreciated if you have to wait and wait for the features to load. Many people use the internet to save time. Making it complicated wastes time. Many auto manufacturer sites use extensive animation. How many people need to see the car move? If they see a static picture, will they believe it can move? Or do they need proof?