During their exhibit at the 2014 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, UniteU Technologies Inc. tested the home and product page load times for 26 volunteer retailers on a blend of 3G and 4G wireless smart phone connections. While 4G was undoubtedly the faster of the two options, the e-commerce product pages took an average of 29.83 seconds to load, ranging from 11 seconds to 50 – nearly a full minute!
These results, revealed exclusively to Internet Retailer, were brought about by a mix of small to large-scale companies, 5 of them using m-commerce sites optimized for smartphones, 7 using pure responsive design sites, and 7 using hybrid/adaptive responsive design sites (lighter than responsive design, this technology only sends to the detected device exactly what is needed to build the page).
UniteU compared these load times to a study by Aberdeen Group that showed a 1-second delay in web site page load time equates to a 7% loss in conversions. If these same retailers were to slim down their load times to the recommended 6 seconds, UniteU suggests they might see anywhere from a 37% to 305% increase in sales conversions.
These numbers make us curious: Last year, Internet Retailer reported that the overall time consumers spent shopping on mobile sites outranked that of desktop PCs. But did the loading time to reach companies via mobile skew those results in a significant way? Does it matter if it did? Mobile is predicted to rake in nearly $50 billion in transaction revenue this year – so if your site’s design does not account for smartphone and iPad use, you’re guaranteed to be losing out.
