How Poor Website Performance Impacts Revenue

Consumer shopping trends are shifting. Online shopping has seen such explosive growth over the last several years that e-commerce is now outpacing the growth of brick-and-mortar businesses. This has fundamentally changed the way that businesses think about performance, both business and website.

In the always-on world of e-commerce, companies pay the price for latency. Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of downtime cost them one percent in sales and Google found that an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped site traffic by 20 percent. Slow performance affects everything from individual transactions, to customer retention and ultimately revenue. E-commerce businesses simply cannot afford to suffer a slip in performance.

This slideshow features five ways, identified by Clustrix, that performance affects the bottom line, as well as tips on how to ensure they don’t happen to you.

E-commerce Performance Matters

Click through for five ways e-commerce performance affects the bottom line, as well as ways you can avoid disaster, as identified by Clustrix.

Abandoned Shopping Carts

If your website takes too long to load, your customers will abandon their shopping carts. In fact, with anything that exceeds six seconds of page load time, you start losing 90 percent of your visitors. Especially in today’s competitive market with customers expecting instantaneous page-load time, your business will truly suffer if your website has slow load time.

Website Crashes

Without a scale-out, fault-tolerant database, your website will not only be unable to handle peaks in traffic, it runs the risk of crashing altogether. If this happens, your customers will surely look elsewhere. Research shows that if your system goes offline, even momentarily, you run the risk of losing them to another vendor. 

Loss of Loyal Customers

It’s a simple concept — repeated poor performance leads to customer loss. Even worse than an abandoned shopping cart, lost customer loyalty can really impact the bottom line. Don’t let a faulty database ruin your reputation and ultimately your business.

Unsuccessful Marketing Campaigns

If your website performance is lackluster, then your marketing campaigns cannot be successfully executed. Why? You need customer data to power campaigns. Without customer data for analytics or targeting, customer conversion and new customer acquisition will be nearly impossible, further hurting your bottom line.

Closed Shop

Worst-case scenario — if your website can’t keep up with demand during peak times, then your biggest sales day could become your last. Bottom line, invest in a 100 percent fault-tolerant, scale-out database that will ensure zero downtime and provide your customers with a seamless shopping experience.