Hate Waiting in Line for the Register? So Do Digital Shoppers.

Finding the shortest checkout line is a game I play every week at the supermarket. I hate waiting in line enough that if I have only one or two items in my cart and the line is not moving? I leave.

It comes as no surprise that online shoppers feel similarly.  Slow or frustrating checkout experiences lead to lost sales and loyalty for ecommerce brands. It’s incredibly easy to abandon an online purchase—even more than one in store. After all, you don’t have to walk back to the dairy aisle first or have an awkward exchange with a sales person. Customers shopping online are less likely to make a purchase with each fraction of a second it takes for a page to load or website to respond. In fact, if it takes longer than a blink of an eye then engagement and conversion rates drop.

As you can see from the below chart pulled from an actual Quantum Metric customer, as average page speed increases above 2 seconds conversion rates drop.

While most digital companies know that performance is important, few understand the severity of getting it wrong or even the rewards for getting it right. “It’s difficult for eCommerce retailers to comprehend that when a site is just a few hundred milliseconds faster, that it could lead to millions of dollars in additional revenue,” our Founder/CEO has said in the past.

Measure & Track

Capturing and tracking key performance metrics is step one in understanding how your site is performing overall. The second step is marrying these metrics with conversion data so that you know where performance improvement can most positively affect your bottom line.  More actionable data points will enable your team to address performance from a business perspective and prioritize slow page loads that are costing the most in revenue.

Understand the Overhead

With all of the tools you utilize to help optimize your digital brand, do you know if any of those are actually hindering your user experience? Make sure that the different technologies used to manage and augment your web and mobile apps are not impacting the performance of your pages.

Not sure how performance is impacting your site? Ask us for an analysis today!