Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Survey results released Wednesday officially report what virtually all E-Commerce execs already knew: It doesn’t take very many bad online experiences to send a consumer to a rival site.

Web-traffic-tracking firm Gomez surveyed 1,173 people in the U.S. last month and found 24 percent will abandon a Web site after the first failed transaction, while most consumers—53 percent—will come back a second time, but will ditch the site after they are burned a second time. About 17 percent of consumers will come back a third time and it will take a third purchase failure to turn them away. (I want to get that last group into a poker game.)

The survey also suggested that 75 percent would immediately jump ship if a site loaded too slowly. Beyond the official reality disclaimer that consumers tend to tell surveyers what they want to tell the sites and not necessarily what they’ll actually do–and that Gomex charges retailers to track online performance so they may not be the most non-biased source for how quickly consumers will abandon slow sites–the results here are likely fair. But if an E-Commerce exec needs a survey to learn that customers will be unhappy if their transactions fail, that exec should probably rethink their dayjob.