Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Although Forrester “found that 40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a Web page to render before abandoning the site,” consider the flip side. The report could have easily been interpreted to say most consumers are rather patient when it comes to site load times, as 60 percent of the respondents said they were willing to wait four or more seconds for a site to load before giving up.

Also, 63 percent of those queried said they tend to sit there and watch while slow sites load rather than become engaged in other tasks. That should be good news to retailers fearful that distractions and multitasking can kill impulse shopping if their site doesn’t exactly explode onto a prospective customer’s screen.

Another hard-to-swallow assertion from the report is its claim that people who experience a slow-loading retailer Web site said they would, in essence, punish the retailer by not only abandoning its site but also reducing their visits to its brick-and-mortar stores. However, the report pegged the number of folks who would do that at a less-than-jaw-dropping 27 percent, meaning that a very large majority of shoppers, logically, don’t shun the local Wal-Mart if Walmart.com is sluggish. Also, we have to wonder if those consumer comments aren’t empty threats to retailers to keep things moving quickly. It seems unlikely that a consumer who truly wanted to buy a TV at the neighborhood Target suddenly wouldn’t because of a two-second delay in opening the Target.com homepage.

For all the report’s faults, it does have value in that it can be compared to the survey conducted three years ago. Even if you don’t buy into the truthfulness or accuracy of the answers, it makes sense to accept that whatever issues cloud this year’s report also clouded the 2006 version. If that’s the case, then Akamai and Forrester are correct in saying people expect more in terms of speed from E-Commerce sites now than they did then.

Rivera said Akamai knows this firsthand, because it has “a lot of customers who are setting goals around being able to decrease the response time on their sites, especially on transaction-related pages.” She noted that Urban Outfitters, the $1.7 billion retailer with 130 stores, came to Akamai “with a goal of having pages load in less than a second” largely because its customers are young and impatient. “While people are adding content and making pages heavier, shoppers want sites to be faster and faster,” Rivera said. “That’s a big challenge for retailers.”

It is. But encouraging retail E-Commerce execs to spend money to accelerate sites beyond a consumer’s likely ability to notice would also be a big challenge, in addition to being a reckless way to spend shrinking IT resources in a day when stores are closing. Wouldn’t pouring those dollars into additional functionality inside the site be a better approach?