[whatusername]

"it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent."

Can any of the bright minds here shed some light on this? 100ms doesn't seem at all enough to have that big an impact. (especially for something like amazon - where there is likely some level of intent and definate trust that the site is valuable). I just can't see how a .1sec delay could affect so many sales?

[Confusion]

If responses times are as low as 50 ms, it usually isn't a problem when it become 150 ms: people don't notice Similarly, if response times are 2 seconds, it doesn't matter that it becomes 2.1 seconds. However, when the response time is 400 ms, then it is a noticable difference when it becomes 500 ms. People notice that: the site feels more sluggish.

Now whenever I shop at Amazon, I browse around for a bit. It's not that a more sluggish site would cause me to abandon a purchase midway in the purchasing process, but it's rather that I might get annoyed at the sluggishness while browsing and postpone my purchase or take it elsewhere, where I can browse the available products at my leisure.

I think that is what they mean, but if the number is just based on assumptions about who intends to make a purchase, that also means the number is highly disputable. However, I think Amazon has enough data available to simply correlate response times with sales rates over a statistically signifcant period and statistically signifcant amount of sales. In that case, the number is pretty undisputable: if anyone has this kind of data, it's Amazon.

[ALee]

Basically, you just run the time to sale and how much cash you're processing and correlate that to time. True, it's not exactly causal, but Google found the same with I believe the quote is "1 second delay in search means $1M lost in revenue"

[puzzle-out]

http://www.drunkenfist.com/304/2008/12/29/why-front-end-perf...

[whatusername]

:) Thanks (all) for responding. I guess I never realised how much of amazons purchases must be spur-of-the-moment. (NOTE: I order stuff from amazon - but usually in groups as I'm shipping it to australia - so all of my stuff is planned - i'm going there to buy something)

But - if anyone has the metrics to prove a figure like that - it would be amazon.