> Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?
Maybe, maybe not, but site load time has a very well documented correlation with bounce rate. And if a user bounces, they're obviously not going to end up spending money.
I believe it's more about keeping the user in a sort of sales/marketing 'funnel'. If I'm just browsing and come across a service I might be vaguely interested in, perhaps I'll click the link to view their page. Now I'm at the top of the funnel. With each link I have to click to follow, there is an opportunity for me to get bored, get distracted by something else, or so on. Maybe I'm not buying anything then, but maybe somewhere along the funnel is a free trial of the service, and if I'm in a pleasant mood, maybe I'll do the trial. But if I bounced because of a 5 sec load time, chances are good the mildly impulsive mood I was in is not going to persist enough to encourage a subsequent visit.
So it might not be an immediate thing, but better engagement does lead to more sales. I like to consider myself a mindful shopper, but there are definitely a handful of $5/month services I am subbed to because I was in a vaguely impulsive mood and stumbled into something I thought might be useful -- and their signup process was silky smooth.
And if you are instead shopping for an item and browsing several different sites, if one of them sticks out because of its slow load times, that's a tab you are going to close.
Maybe, maybe not, but site load time has a very well documented correlation with bounce rate. And if a user bounces, they're obviously not going to end up spending money.
I believe it's more about keeping the user in a sort of sales/marketing 'funnel'. If I'm just browsing and come across a service I might be vaguely interested in, perhaps I'll click the link to view their page. Now I'm at the top of the funnel. With each link I have to click to follow, there is an opportunity for me to get bored, get distracted by something else, or so on. Maybe I'm not buying anything then, but maybe somewhere along the funnel is a free trial of the service, and if I'm in a pleasant mood, maybe I'll do the trial. But if I bounced because of a 5 sec load time, chances are good the mildly impulsive mood I was in is not going to persist enough to encourage a subsequent visit.
So it might not be an immediate thing, but better engagement does lead to more sales. I like to consider myself a mindful shopper, but there are definitely a handful of $5/month services I am subbed to because I was in a vaguely impulsive mood and stumbled into something I thought might be useful -- and their signup process was silky smooth.
And if you are instead shopping for an item and browsing several different sites, if one of them sticks out because of its slow load times, that's a tab you are going to close.