Photo Courtesy GothamSchools
With millions of kids heading to back to school this week, it is no surprise that back to school sales are second only to the Christmas season. Sales for K-12 are expected to generate $30.3 billion this year. The average consumer will spend $688.52for supplies and clothing for their K-12 kids, a 14% increase from the previous year.
According to the National Retail Federation, 40% of consumers plan to purchase school supplies and clothing online. Consumers will not only shop online for competitive pricing, but they will also compare prices online before heading to a local B&M for purchase. Thus, it is critical that retailers be ready to deliver a stellar web experience.
Neustar looked at the load times for 10 retailers of school supplies and clothing for K-12 kids. These include Old Navy, Sears, Staples, Office Depot, and Target. All have local B&M stores and an online presence.
Studies have shown that most consumers will abandon a website if it does not load within 3 seconds or less. Using the 3-second load time as a benchmark, a one-second delay will result in a 1% loss in revenues. For example, Office Depot did $4.1B in web sales in 2011. A one-second delay would have resulted in a $41M loss in revenues! Needless to say, monitoring website performance was a critical task.
As you can see in the graph above, the average load time for these retailers is 11 seconds. None met the 3-second threshold. Office Depot scored the best coming in at 4 seconds. With the holiday season approaching, online sales are expected to be larger than ever. Are you ready?
Comments are closed.