Customers Increasingly Intolerant With Slow Web Sites – PC World- E-Business

Consumers have very little patience for online stores, e-banks and travel sites that slow down, act erratically or crash during busy transaction seasons, according to a new study from Gomez, a provider of Web performance optimization tools and services. As the intolerance with clunky Web sites rises, so does the cost of lost e-business for the banks, retailers and travel agencies running these sites, according to the study , which was conducted by Equation Research and will be officially announced next week. For the study, Gomez polled around 1,500 people who have conducted e-transactions during what it calls “peak seasons,” like the holidays for retailers, school vacation periods for travel agencies and marked stock-market changes for banks and brokerages. In 2009, 72 percent of survey respondents said they encountered slower Web sites more frequently during “peak” periods, he said. While catastrophic, lengthy Web site crashes are becoming less and less common, retailers, financial institutions and travel agencies now need to further fine-tune performance so that consumer experience is consistently solid. Finally, Web sites need to be continually monitored, in particular from a customer’s perspective, so that companies are aware of latency issues for users located in a specific region or high error rates tied to the use of a particular browser type and version, he said. read more

Technorati Tags: sites, web, business, percent, site, peak, e-business