Reduce annoyances
For online shoppers, advertisements tend to be the most frustrating factor in using the Web. According to Retail Forward (2002), the top five online shopping frustrations are:
- Pop-up boxes with visiting/shopping a site 52%- Banners advertisements 50%
- Congested web pages (e.g., too many ads, images, etc.) 35%
- Slow load times 26%
- Difficult to find a specific product 20%
General Web user surveys have found that most dissatisfying web experiences are, a) not being able to find specific information, b) using websites that are confusing, and c) websites with slow download time, respectively (10th GVU survey, 1998). The fist two major annoyances are addressed in the navigation and the positioning of information discussion, respectively.
The third annoyance, slow downloads, are a very common complaint, which have been known to negatively affect user satisfaction, and ultimately sales. In fact, it has been estimated that as much as $4.35 billion in e-commerce sales have been lost each year due to user frustration related to slow downloads (Zona Research, 1999). In fact, ZDNet reported that a survey of 12,000 online customers found that 48% of them gave up trying to purchase an item online because the web pages took too long to load (ZDNet, 2000). Moreover, it has been found that slower web pages were significantly judged as being less interesting than their faster counterparts (Ramsay, 1998), and were thought to have lower quality products, as well as having compromised security (Bouch, et al., 2000).
Currently, the average connection speed is approximately 5Kbps (kilobytes per second). Thus, a 40 Kb web page will take approximately eight seconds to download. This just fits within the so-called 'eight second rule', which is considered the recommended loading time for web pages. That is, it has been suggested that users will tolerate no more than around eight seconds for a web page to download.