Online retail customers have less and less patience for poorly performing Web applications.

Forrester’s recent report on “eCommerce Web Site Performance Today “clearly shows that customer frustration leads to lost sales. The report was commissioned by Akamai Technologies and is available (after registering) at www.akamai.com/2seconds.

• - 69 % of dissatisfied online shoppers indicated that they are less likely to buy from a poorly performing site again.
• - 64 % would simply purchase from another online store.
• - 47 % of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less
• - 40 % of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a Web page to render before abandoning a site.

These are sobering statistics indeed, particularly for etailers that don’t proactively manage and monitor site performance and actual, delivered service levels. Synthetic testing alone does not provide the needed level of visibility into actual, delivered performance because it misses far too much of the action.

The clear trend is that consumers are even more demanding now than in the past. The study reveals that forty-seven percent of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less. That consumer expectation is a sea change from a similar 2006 Forrester study which showed that the majority of customers expected page loads of 4 seconds or less.

Most revealing is the finding that forty percent of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a Web page to render before abandoning the site.

The report concludes: “It is clear that there are serious consequences for an online retailer with an underperforming site. However, by taking steps to improve site features and performance, online retailers can look to increase overall consumer satisfaction and ultimately increase sales. Forrester recommends that online retailers test their Web site performance, fix easy site features and performance issues before attempting to address larger problems, as well as improve the multichannel experience by addressing content and functionality issues on the retail site.”

Every business that relies on the Web needs to understand exactly the service quality they are providing to online customers. How can you accomplish that?

Coradiant provides TrueSight Automated Incident Management and TrueSight Edge which are specifically designed to help solve the Web application performance problem. With Coradiant, reports on performance, availability, and traffic volumes are only a click away. When problems occur, they can quickly be detected, localized, and resolved. IT operations can now manage user performance and optimize and troubleshoot important functions, including Akamai traffic, and then drill down to specific parts of the infrastructure to see how they handle transactions.

Coradiant TrueSight is the most cost-effective means to achieve a single, comprehensive “voice of the online customer.”