来源：《哈佛商业评论》2023年7月8月双月刊
It’s no surprise that a slow website can frustrate customers and cause some to log off without completing their purchases. Now researchers have quantified the effect, finding that delays of just a fraction of a second can mean a significant hit to sales.
毫无疑问，一个缓慢的网站会让客户感到沮丧，导致一些人在没有完成购买的情况下退出。现在，研究人员已经量化了这种影响，发现仅仅几分之一秒的延迟就可能对销售造成重大影响。
The researchers obtained two years’ worth of daily sales and visitor data from seven large international clothing brands along with data on specific website pages of a personal hygiene brand. They mapped that against detailed website performance data from the digital-experience management company Catchpoint. This showed that a 10% increase in website load time led, on average, to a 2.4% decrease in revenue per visitor and a 4.2% decrease in total sales and that customers who experienced a slowdown were less likely to revisit the website later that day. People were most sensitive to delays when checking out, perhaps because of the transactional nature of the task and the pain of making a payment. The impact was somewhat larger on the mobile channel than on the desktop one. And sales lost to sluggish performance did not appear to be recovered in subsequent days.
研究人员获得了七个大型国际服装品牌两年来的每日销售额和访客数据，以及一个个人卫生品牌特定网站页面的数据。他们对比了数字体验管理公司Catchpoint提供的详细网站性能数据。这表明，网站加载时间每增加10%，平均每位访问者的消费就会下降2.4%，总销售额下降4.2%，并且经历了访问速度放缓的客户当天晚些时候不太可能再次访问网站。人们在结账时对延迟最为敏感，这可能是因为结账任务的交易性质，以及付款的痛苦。移动渠道受到的影响比桌面渠道更大。在随后的几天里，由于访问延迟而损失的销售额似乎没有恢复。
Some internet slowdowns are unavoidable, of course, but the researchers say that retailers can take several measures to improve their websites’ average speed. Because third-party content providers inflate load times considerably, retailers should choose them selectively and limit their numbers at the critical checkout stage. Likewise, “retailers can simplify the checkout page by only providing and collecting essential information from customers,” the researchers write. “Offering faster payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay can also reduce customers’ perceived waiting times.”
当然，有些网速变慢是不可避免的，但研究人员表示，零售商可以采取一些措施来提高网站的平均速度。由于第三方内容提供商大大延长了加载时间，零售商应该有选择地使用第三方内容，并在关键的结账阶段限制第三方内容的数量。同样，“零售商可以通过只提供和收集顾客的基本信息来简化结账页面，”研究人员写道。“提供更快的支付选择，如苹果支付和谷歌支付，也可以减少顾客的等待时间。”