The online market is highly competitive and switching costs are low
The online market place is highly competitive. Within the travel, retail, gambling and financial services sectors companies offer same or similar goods where differentiation is in the price and customer experience.
Switching costs are low, meaning that if users are unhappy with the online experience, they can easily switch to another store that will provide them with the same or similar goods.
How do slow websites impact revenue?
Obviously if the web site crashes, this will drive switching behaviour. But what if the page load times are slower than a rival’s web site? When we monitored the web sites of the leading UK retailers during Black Friday, we found that the Argos web site was significantly slower than its rivals
For each additional second in page load time, conversion rate drops by up to 1.7 percentage points
There is lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest that slow web sites mean more shoppers abandon their baskets, but here at Capacitas we are data-driven so we decided to follow an empirical approach. We help many clients scale their online stores to meet peak demand and in the course of these engagements we collect a wealth of data around e-commerce performance, most notably:
- Page load time
- Conversion rate – the % of visitors to your online store who purchase goods
We analysed real data from 3 online stores over 2 years, in different industry sectors, and our results were startling: these online stores could gain an additional £20 million in revenue per year by simply speeding their sites up by 1 second.
If you would like to learn more about our Prepare for Peak and Performance testing solutions, please click below, to see our latest Ebook.
