A recent study discovered that in the United States, 29% of shoppers start their searches at Amazon. The best way to compete with Amazon is to make sure your site loads and performs quickly to create a seamless shopping and web experience for your customers. A two-second delay can make or break you, with an average 36% decrease in conversions.
Understanding the strength of companies like Amazon, and the metrics associated with their success can give online retailers the advantage that they need to level the playing field more than ever before. Whether your store uses a website, a mobile app, or a combination to reach its audience, understanding the core metrics of performance are of paramount importance. Read more in the article below, which provides six eCommerce performance metrics as best practices that you need to know to compete with Amazon.
29% of US. shoppers start their product searches on Amazon
This year many people will begin their Christmas shopping by doing Google searches or checking things out at Amazon. In fact, a recent study discovered that in the United States, almost thirty percent of shoppers start their discovery process at Amazon. It’s no wonder why online retailers are asking themselves more and more, whether it’s even possible to compete online with sites like Amazon. The good news is that Amazon has shown the way for other online store owners: performance counts. The best way to compete with Amazon is to make sure your site loads and performs quickly.
Pages that converted were up to 26% faster than those that did not
In a study that looked at billions of product pageviews on some of the best ecommerce sites online, one of the largest conversion factors was performance. They discovered that pages that converted were up to 26% faster than the site pages that saw low or no conversion. In practical terms, it’s the difference between pages that load in 3 seconds instead of 4. But that extra second can have a tremendous impact to your bottom line. This is even more important when mobile visitors arrive on site. Some sites are seeing up to 56% of their conversions come from mobile phones – where every second counts.
Just a 100-milisecond delay in load time hurt conversion rates by up to 7%
The number of third party scripts (like those provided by Facebook and Google) on an eCommerce store can number over 20. When combined with the fact that many small and medium online stores run on under-resourced hardware, the performance result can easily be measured in seconds. But even a page that loads 100 millisecond slower than another can hurt conversion by rates up to 7% (for mobile devices). As mentioned before, mobile users don’t and won’t handle slow performance and make up more than 50% of bounced sessions on eCommerce sites.
A two second delay in load time hurt bounce rates by up to 103%
A site’s bounce rate is determined by the traffic that arrives on a single page and then departs the site from the same page without visiting any other parts of the site. A person arrives and doesn’t peruse the site at all, they just leave – hence the use of the term “bounce.” Sites that took 2.7 seconds to load saw bounce rates, in one study, of 29%. When visitors experienced site performance of 700 milliseconds (2 seconds faster), the bounce rate dropped to 14.1%. That’s a difference of 103%. It won’t surprise you that the users most unwilling to explore an eCommerce site were those visiting on mobile phones.
A two second delay in load time on desktops decreased conversions by 36.5%
While we’ve highlighted how important performance is for mobile users, desktop users shouldn’t be ignored. Desktop shoppers, in one recent study, made up 55% of all eCommerce transactions – even if they made up only 35% of the traffic. This is why it’s so important to ensure that even desktop buyers experience a highly performant online store. Keeping the page load under 2 seconds (1.8s) made a massive difference compared to loading at almost 4 seconds (3.8s). A two second delay was found to decrease conversions by 36.5%.
Pages with the lowest bounce rates had start render times ranging from 0.9 to 1.5 seconds
The start render measurement is the time it takes for the user to see the first signs of a webpage. It is made up of the time it takes for your server to respond, the time it takes to process scripts in the HEAD of your page, and the initial page rendering. While paying attention to total load time is important, the start render measurement is the one that tells a user the page is there, that it’s loading. And when that takes too long, users leave. As you can see, optimizing this, so that your start render can be under 1.5 seconds will have an optimal benefit for your site’s bounce rate.
The three factors you need to pay attention to in order to compete with Amazon
As Akamai has said in a recent report, to stay competitive with Amazon, store owners need to understand, “how real users are experiencing your site, and how even small or intermittent slowdowns could be hurting your business.” As mentioned above, start render time is critical to your visitors. The best way to improve performance is to make sure your server is the fastest it can be. The second factor in performance for online stores is the use of intelligent caching and CDNs. If you can cache scripts and distribute the performance load, even 100 milliseconds will count. The third factor is real-time performance monitoring. The moment a site slows down, you need to know about it so you can take immediate action. Every second counts.
Source: Liquide Web
