Are Online Retailers Too Slow to Satisfy Their Customers?

I believe that retailers have not aligned their website characteristics with qualities that satisfy customers. And that’s mostly because they focus on razzle dazzle sophistication instead of shopper perceptions. My in depth (eye tracking with interview) studies of visitor reactions to websites convinces me that retailers have been led astray by the thought that changes to their website pages are inexpensive. This article reinforces the true cost, i.e. loss of customers and their shopping dollars.

It’s not about speed. It’s about the perception of speed, the context of speed and the impact of speed. If the visitor’s goal is to complete a particular transaction, they will want to garner their information quickly and next conveniently pay for the product(s).

However, don’t mistake the speed to load a page with arriving at information quickly. If you direct the consumer to a page before the page with the actual product information or push out “you may also be interested in” too soon, you can drive that customer away.

In other words an extra two or three seconds when you are searching for information related to a cancer diagnosis is quite different from three seconds when you are looking for diapers, but probably more similar (forgive me) when you are looking for information about computers, televisions, or vacations.

Retailers should spend a few seconds (I mean hours/days) to better understand their target visitor and website shopper so they can allocate their navigation priorities correctly.

Speed is important, but not at the expense of delivering the right content in the right format. Ecommerce is not a drag race, it is about closing the sale. Obviously if the initial load screen is taking longer than the shopper expectation, you will see a drop in visitors and abandoned baskets. The best retailers fine tune the balance to make sure the majority of the visitors has a great experience in terms of load speed versus delivering content for their specific device.

Page speed is an endemic problem in e-commerce experiences. Sites are getting bigger and slower every year, even though we have overwhelming data that faster sites have higher conversion.

The problem is that most of our presentation layer developers don’t understand how and aren’t yet motivated to focus on page performance. The result is that most of our front end code is very poorly optimized. Add in the fact that media keeps getting richer and larger. We’re using more responsive design techniques (which almost always result in worst page performance on every platform), and we use way too many third party pixels to build our e-commerce pages (analytics platforms, social tools, advertising tools, etc…), and you have a recipe for slow pages.

Even worse, more and more traffic is moving to mobile with much lower bandwidth, usually served by third party proxy servers, multiple redirects, and/or bad responsive design implementations and experience on mobile is almost always slower.

And the icing on the cake is very few sites even know how to properly measure page speed. They focus on back-end servers, and use synthetic performance benchmarks that give them a widely rosy picture of their own page speed. I always start by suggesting that clients implement a Real User Monitoring (RUM) protocol, to get an accurate picture of their page speed.

When facing an e-commerce market plan, any attempts to set aside speed as mission critical is suicidal. Anyone in all generations using the internet expects instant everything. So the message of concern for performance sake is clear and accurate. What “Radware” failed to directly include with the discussion information is both significant and important for this evaluation summary.

The company, “Radware,” did vaguely disclose the test methodology used in this determination which is, of course, supportive of the data provided. But there are circumstances which are of equal value especially for current and future apps/site design and development which need to be included for aspect and range purposes. I would first disclose that my concerns place no faults in the conclusion or test methods used to validate the content of this discussion. However, when this information is placed into or measured on its own against the good book of the entire e-commerce market, it stands out as incomplete at best. The e-commerce society is solely dependent on and forced to adhere to the Information Technology (IT) providers. In the IT world, speed, power, and footprint are burning desires without rival. Software developments are placed in the market to quench urgent consumer inquiry and information demands while allowing for and/or creating needs for additional and or further developments. Speed is the easy and usual go-to immanent need for the newest release of any software(s) to meet “all” of the consumers’ never ending “I need it now” demands.

The solution is, as you may already expect, the next generation of bigger, better, faster, and of course more powerful and easier to use hardware in a thinner platform, often called the next generation of things you wanted right now. But guess what, this new next generation gadget was forced to use the current energy source design due to development issues with the next generation battery or charger. And so on and so forth, forever and ever, we hope.

That said, I know this information is scary stuff for the retail executives out there, but don’t worry, help is ALWAYS on the way. So just keep on designing and improving your e-commerce platforms based on the latest proven IT technologies available to you and your customers—or you will surely wish you did.

Speed? Yes, of course (though I’m not sure “design sophistication” is a positive we need to balance against…not if it means logos taking off and rotating in space or penguins doing tap dances, or other things that seem to satisfy the creative urges of designers more than being practical to consumers).

But, as others have noted, there are other “musts” as well; though I don’t see why something like layout or clarity of design is an “either/or.”

As a digital marketer, I know that you must have fast websites that load. You have an average of about two seconds before your prospect is ready to head off elsewhere, and this is becoming even more commonplace because there is even more competition on the Internet nowadays compared to even just a few years ago. Additionally, most people have high-speed Internet, plus they have access to the Internet virtually everywhere whether it’s via PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet, game console, etc.

As a result, loading times for your websites are incredibly important, probably more important than fancy designs or design sophistication. Most people aren’t looking for fancy graphics and shopping carts with tons of features, as this only confuses them and makes it more likely they will abandon the purchase. Yet, I know there are still many companies and entrepreneurs who are still focused on how good their site looks, what features the site has, etc.

Studies and reports have shown that sites with the best content, simple checkout systems, and quick loading times are the best ones of turning prospects into customers, and this is even more true today because there is more competition on the Internet and the public is becoming even more impatient when they are looking for specific information and offers. They do not want to wait because they don’t have time due to our fast-paced society. Even more so, they know they don’t have to wait because there are many other options that can provide what they are looking for on THEIR terms and timetables.

Therefore, I think three seconds is definitely pushing it when it comes to making people wait; it really should be two seconds or less. Additionally, sites are well-served when useful, engaging content (text, audio, video, combination of all three) comes onto the screen “above the fold” immediately to engage the prospect so that he/she isn’t sitting there in the event the rest of your site does take a long time to load. If you have no content on the visible screen within two seconds, your chances of converting your prospect into a customer are essentially zero.