On Latency of E-Commerce Platforms

Abstract

ABSTRACT For e-commerce retailers, even small increases in waiting times have been found to lead to user dissatisfaction and losses in sales. This paper investigates how contextual and behavioral factors influence the impact of latency on the website performance of a real e-commerce platform. The results show an increased impact of latency for users with faster navigation speed and mobile users. They further show a long-term effect of latency on customer returns and confirm previous findings that show a lower impact of latency for users that are familiar with a website. These results provide a case for real-time behavioral analytics by classifying customers based on navigational speed. It further points out two ways to increase revenue: (i) by prioritization of customers and (ii) by optimization of web-pages toward lower latency.