Does your Shopping Cart Suffer High Bounce Rate? This could be the Reason…

You’ve convinced visitors to hang around your online store through Adwords and SEO efforts. They’ve even found the product they were looking for. But then they leave. Why? Most of the visitors that leave, even after they found the right product, actually spend a good amount of time on your site. On average, e-commerce websites lose 65% of the visitors that have found a product and added it to the shopping cart. This shopping cart abandonment rate is huge and it is one of the major problems you should be tackling right now. Did you stop and think that it might be your site-speed that caused this?

How Fast is your Cart?

One of the main reasons people abandon their shopping cart is because it is too slow, and this figure stands at an 46% abandonment rate. This is not to mean that they didn’t like the items, or that they did not see the information they wanted, or that we failed to give them the right call to action. And do you know how much money is lost every year from cart abandonment just as a result of slow website pages? – a staggering $3 BILLION! This is definitely a lot of money lost simply because of slow pages. Now, this goes beyond just top line revenue metrics. For every second a site’s page load time is slow, the percentage of revenue that it loses is 1.8%. When a site takes 2 seconds to load, this loss is reduced by 4.3%. So, what these numbers mean is that not only does a slow website reduce the overall amount of revenue coming into a business, but it also lowers the amount of A/B testing software measuring revenue per visitor (RPV)” href=”https://www.convert.com” target=”_blank”>revenue per user. And when you own an E-commerce user site, that’s a metric you’re always striving to increase. People buy less when sites are slow. When sites are faster, they buy more. It’s as simple as that. Another thing, when your online shoppers are dissatisfied with the website performance, they are unlikely to come back. People have a strong memory, or a sort of gut feeling, about an unpleasant web experience. When they decide to shop for the top of the line pair shoes, for instance, where do you think they will go to? They’ll visit the website that they found to be fast, not the one that was slow.

Amazon Takes it a Step Further…

Amazon is a business deeply interested in site performance, after all, that’s where they conduct their business. They have hundreds of people responsible for speeding up their website. What’s remarkable is that they think about site load time in hundreds of milliseconds, as opposed to entire seconds. The reason is because they found that for every hundred millisecond that they could speed up their site, it meant a 1% increase in revenue which could also mean that for every fraction of the second their site was slower, they noticed that they lost 1% of their total revenue, which of course to them translates to multi-million dollars. So, they invest in great deals that could optimize site speed and performance which as users you’ve probably already noticed. That’s the effect of bounce rate in terms of site availability and site speed. In another example, Target carried out a study that found that 150 minutes of site bounce time was functionally a half million dollars in lost revenue. So, for every few hours that a website like Target is bounced, it equates to a real dollar amount of lost revenue. This is all very logical, but as a marketer, it’s a bit of a different perspective to think in terms of site speed and performance and user engagement. This extract is from one of Convert Academy’s webinar dubbed How Site Speed Can Impact Conversions by Lucy Orloski. Lucy Orloski has been doing conversion marketing for about 8 years now. In the past, she’s worked in large-scale SEM, and spent three and a half years at a company called HubSpot. Today though, she’s working with Yottaa to help businesses speed up their websites, increase conversion, user engagement and revenue. You can check out the entire webinar here.