Impatient Surfers

Thursday, 16th November 2006

News to stun webpage builders, apparently people are off if it doesn’t load in four seconds. Although, to be fair, it refers to online shops and they only asked people, so it’s not backed up with actual tests. It came second to shipping costs as the biggest hates of online shopping.

It found that one-third of those questioned abandon sites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.

The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.

To make matters worse, the research found that the experience shoppers have on a retail site colours their entire view of the company behind it.


While I would generally agree with the research that a bad site reflects on a company, I would say that a bad website is an indicator, how hard is it to get a good one? I use that as a rule of thumb when using companies I haven’t used before. I’d also say the four second rule was rubbish, if I’m on a site I want to buy something from chances are it took a lot of research to get there or I’ve used them before and I’m prepared to wait knowing page loading problems do occur.

The difference comes when there are two companies, both selling the same item for the same price, that’s when I go with the site that is easier to use provided their service is up to scratch, but that rarely happens.

  • Print This Post/Page | Print
  • Comment on this post | Comment

Related Articles

This article was posted in General, you might find the following articles interesting, they're supposed to be related.

  • Odeon Redux

    I've just received an email from Matthew Somerville, the guy who Odeon forced to take down his acces ...

  • A Heart-Warming Email

    I received an email stating the following yesterday. HOW WE TREAT PEOPLE Five lessons to ma ...

Comments

↑ TOP

Be the first to comment on this post

Write a Comment




* - Required

You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>