Online shopping has become a mainstay of consumerism. With the rapidly evolving technology behind smartphones and tablets, mobile shopping has taken on a new form as the retailing juggernaut that is reshaping everything.
A 2014 Retale survey of 1,000 consumers found that about half of them prefer to shop from their mobile device. A more recent study that was conducted by Arc Worldwide concurs, finding that 50% of American shoppers are using mobile devices to buy goods and services online.
But the kicker is here: Cart abandonment rates and site loading speed are a hammer to your bottom line. If your website takes too long to load, chances are that you are losing a lot more customers than you think, and for nothing more than the fact that they become impatient and bounce away to another website.
Slow Checkouts = Increased Abandonment
New site speed statistics go hand in hand with cart abandonment rates overall. The simple equation is that the slower your website is, the more likely you are losing revenue due to cart abandoners, who likely went to a competitor and closed the sale in the aftermath.
Some recent statistics we’ve culled provide the real grit.
- A slow website can result in abandonment rates as high as 75%.
- 47% of shoppers want your site pages to load in two seconds or less.
- Loyalty drops by 50% when site speed is too slow.
- 64% of shoppers won’t return if your site takes too long to load.
- A three-second loading time results in a 40% bounce or abandonment rate.
Conversion Snapshot
A fast online checkout system can result in much healthier conversions. But to understand just what the difference might equate to, let’s take a look at what a slow site speed is costing you as far as conversions are concerned.
As the graph below demonstrates, time is indeed money. As you can tell, the healthiest amount of conversions is obtained inside of a two-second window. For each second that follows, the conversions drop by around 7% per second. After about seven seconds, it really doesn’t matter anymore; you’ve already lost any potential customer you had hoped to reach.
How Fast is Your Checkout?
If you are wondering how fast your site’s pages are loading, including your shopping cart, you can easily test the speed for free at Pingdom. This tool will provide you and your IT team with a detailed report, grading sheet and checklist that can help you make the changes necessary to improve site speed.
Knowing that just one second of lag can result in 7% fewer conversions, if your site speed comes back a little too sour for your ecommerce taste buds, know that an investment into speed improvement is warranted, and that the ROI is healthy, especially in the long term.
These following facts on slow checkout speeds and cart abandonment rates should be all the proof you need to make the change.
- 21% of shoppers abandon a cart due to loading time (Shopify).
- 15% of shoppers abandon a cart due the website timing out (Shopify).
- 66% of shoppers abandon a cart due to slow loading speed (Practical Commerce).
Improving Speed
If you’ve tested your checkout and site speed and have concluded that it’s sluggish, there are some things that you can do to remedy the situation. If you are not technically adept with IT, the aforementioned Pingdom test above may not help you rectify the issues at hand. Here are some suggestions that you can consider along the way to find a proactive solution.
- Consider changing your shopping cart or store host to a reliable provider like 3dcart, Shopify, Prestashop and others.
- Look into your hosting plan – you may be exceeding your bandwidth, which would cause your speed to become throttled by your ISP.
- Upgrade your hosting or choose a new host to improve site speed.
- Consider a speed-friendly site overhaul, but realize it will come with a cost attached to it.
Loading Time & Your Bottom Line
Speed is everything when you are on the information superhighway. Shoppers all suffer from lead foot syndrome, which means that you need to deliver an engine that hums on eight cylinders of supercharged data transmission to continuously earn their business and the valued referral of their friends and family.
How might site speed be choking the throttle on your bottom line? Take a look at this detailed infographic from KissMetrics. It offers the facts you’ll need to arrive at a plausible conclusion that permanently resolves your site speed issues and shopping cart sluggishness.
