As an online retailer, one of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of your operation is to have a website and shopping portal that is humming along without any glitches. We’ve stressed the importance of optimization in several posts before, most recently in our 5 Merchant Tips for 2010 and Cyber Monday Merchant Tips blogs to reinforce just howcritical this component of running an online store is.
Why are we bringing this up now? Because we came across a report that substantiates what we’ve said all along—a shopping portal with technology problems more often than not results in lost customers, lost sales and a boost for your competition. In short, it says that online shoppers have very little patience or tolerance for sites that take too long to load or malfunction during the transaction process, especially during the busy holiday shopping season.
The survey, conducted by Equation Research for Gomez, the web-performance division of Compuware Corp., polled 1,500 consumers between Dec. 16-22 of last year, all of whom had used the web to buy products or services over a nine-month period of 2009. The standout statistic from the findings: the revelationthat one out of every five shoppers who experience problems or wait times when using a retailer’s site are likely to go to a competitor’s site instead.
This is a very important study for online retailers. More than half of those polled indicated that they spend a “significant” portion of their web purchasing dollars during peak holiday shopping times, meaning that this data is collected from some of the most consistent and experienced online shoppers out there. These are people who rely on the web for most of their shopping needs, whose online spending likely exceeds the national average of about $1,050 annually. In short, they’re people you want as customers.
What else did the report reveal? One third of the respondents said they had a bad experience on retail and travel sites during the 2009 holiday shopping period. Additionally, 41 percent said they’ll tolerate no more than two glitches with a retailer’s site before they’ll abandon it for a competitor.
But here’s where it gets really critical. More than one-third of those polled said they moved on to competing web sites because of poor performance. 47 percent of those people left a poorly-operated site with a negative perception of that retailer (and one that probably won’t result in a return visit), while another 42 percent admitted that they shared the negative experiences they had with others via blogs, on social networking sites, and via emails and word-of-mouth. Obviously, that’s the kind of advertising no business wants.
“The first lesson for online retailers is that performance matters on peak time,” said Jeff Loeb, Gomez vice president of product marketing. “Secondly, in terms of what they can do, [online retailers] need to be much more proactive in determining if their web application infrastructure can support [peak time] shopping.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Check out our previous postings on the subject to learn more about how you can optimize your web site for maximum performance and total customer satisfaction. We’ll continue to track studies like this in the future so we can gauge what’s happening out there in the industry but as always, feel free to leave us your comments and suggestions below!
