How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales

Research on US Internet habits suggests that if this sentence takes longer than a second to load, many citizens will have clicked elsewhere already.

The data comes from an infographic compiled by OnlineGraduatePrograms.com, with the specific goal of finding out about tolerance of slow webpage speeds for the average U.S. web user. Then they extended the data to cover other habits that take time, like waiting in line or being served in a restaurant. It turns out that Americans are an astonishingly impatient lot. One in four people abandons surfing to a website if its page takes longer than four seconds to load. That's just four "Mississippis," guys. Four in 10 Americans give up accessing a mobile shopping site that won't load in just three seconds. The greater majority of Americans also won't wait in line for more than 15 minutes. Fifty percent wouldn't go back again to an establishment that kept them waiting for something. So you'd better serve them swiftly the first time if you want their repeat commerce, no matter what Groupon deal you can cook up. Surprising as all this may be, the implications of this impatience are even more shocking. Amazon's calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just 1/4 of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day--meaning they'd serve up many millions fewer online adverts.