Getting Acquainted with the 21st Century E-Commerce Customer

From expecting your website to load in milliseconds to constantly judging your website aesthetics, today’s 21^st century e-commerce customers have exceedingly high expectations and it’s up to you to have the right website monitoring solution in place to manage end user experience and address these demands.

Let’s take a look at three characteristics of the modern day e-commerce shopper:

1. 1. Impatient: Your website load time is just as important as your core offerings as 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less and 40 percent will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load, according to data aggregated by KISSmetrics. Nowadays, your load time speed is intrinsically linked to the end user experience. In fact, the Aberdeen Group reports that even a one second delay in page load time equals a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7% loss in the conversion of sales. Simply put, time is not on your side when it comes to e-commerce customers.

1. 1. Thrifty: Today’s e-commerce customers are more aggressively price comparing, oftentimes not even visiting your website until they have assessed how you stack up against your competition. Specifically, some of the most common activities of online shoppers are to compare prices, browse for discounts, sift through reviews and evaluate product information. But, having the best deal is not enough. If your website performs poorly, your prospects are more likely to move past the fact that you offer the cheapest holiday gift bags in favor of a faster more user-friendly e-commerce platform.

1. Gossipy: As an e-commerce business, you cannot forget that your customers are more apt to spread the word about negative customer experiences than positive ones. As explained by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000.” Having the right website monitoring solution in place, though, allows you to take critical steps towards reducing the amount of negative chatter surrounding your brand.

Bottom line, website speed is king. Learn more about website monitoring solutions, or get a benchmark of your web performance with a Website Monitoring – Free Trial.