Thursday
Feb052009
Amazon: Milliseconds means Money
Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 9:49AM
John Gruber resurfaces interesting stuff:
On this post, an Amazon.com employee concurred; In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
A Google researcher saw a 1/2 second page delay cause a 20% drop in traffic and revenue.
On this post, an Amazon.com employee concurred; In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
Based on the above quote let's simplify and say revenue drops off linearly with the delay of the appearance of page, with a delta based on the Google research. Taking into account Amazon.com's Revenue for 2007 was USD $14.835 Billion…
500ms = 20% loss = USD$ 2.967 Billion loss
100ms = 4% loss = USD$ 593,400,000
1ms = 0.04% loss = USD$ 5,934,000
By this logic, every extra millisecond the page takes to load costs Amazon.com almost six million lost dollars in revenue.
(btw, I know UI&us is currently loading slowly and realize the hypocrisy! I'm working on this problem with someone already. Any tips are welcome.)
Reader Comments (2)
Don't you mean Google? You refer to Marissa Mayer, VP of User Experience at Google, but your article refers to amazon...?
You're quite right, what a mix up! Now fixed. I think the extrapolation of the figures is still worth considering.