Consumers Have Zero Tolerance For Crappy Online Experiences

Consumers have zero tolerance for poor performing websites.

Why is that? Because free-flowing Internet access is considered a given, just like electricity, water and air. Users feel that technology has advanced far enough to eliminate slow performance, incomplete and/or inaccessible pages, and dropped transactions. And if they run into these situations, they’re likely to quickly turn to the competition.

And if that isn’t disconcerting enough, a key finding of research by 1and1 is that 58 percent of consumers have decided to avoid a company in the future as a result of finding a faulty website. Some 68 percent of US users are more critical towards website errors today than they were five years ago.

Worse still 90 percent of websites are not mobile optimized, yet the impact of mobile commerce is growing immensely. For example 44 percent of Americans use their mobile devices to access the internet and 38 percent have made a purchase using their smartphone.

What’s an online business to do? Start by choosing a robust hosting provider. Next get your site mobile optimized – yesterday! Lastly, listen to your customers. Evaluate abandoned shopping cart ratios…get on top of your site’s positive and negative metrics. There’s a treasure trove there, but only if you use it.