Back to School: 2 Seconds Will Make or Break Mobile Retailers

Ann Ruckstuhl
Learn more about Akamai

As we enter August, back to school shopping season is in full swing. While research shows that a lot of back to school shopping still happens in brick-and-mortars, Americans are increasingly turning to their computers and mobile devices to stock up on back to school essentials.


According to the NPD Group, last year the e-commerce channel gained $90 million in dollar share growth versus brick-and-mortar, and predictions are that this year the gains could be even higher. As for mobile, new data shows that smartphone purchases for back to school have doubled.

But with this increase in mobile traffic comes a heightened expectation.

In 2014, the page load time that yielded the best conversion rate was six seconds. Now it's two. In other words, consumers will only give an online or mobile store two seconds to work — if a site or app jams or is slow, then it's hasta la vista.

The Continuing Rise of Mobile

SOASTA conducted a year over year comparison study of digital back to school traffic, discovering that in 2014, just over 60 percent of total traffic came from desktop users, while around 33 percent came from smartphones.

Just one year later, for the same set of sites, 65 percent of traffic came from smartphones, while 25 percent came from desktop. And this traffic does not solely consist of people browsing or window shopping on mobile devices only to return home and make purchases from their desktop computers. In 2014, the peak conversion rate for this set of sites was a mere 0.4 percent. Just twelve months later, the peak conversion rate for the same set of sites was over 2.2 percent — that's a change of 450 percent.

Americans Hate Delays

In a Harris poll of more than 2,000 Americans, 91 percent of back to school shoppers said they find making online purchases stressful, with 27 percent citing slow load times and 25 percent frustrated by pages crashing in the middle of a transaction.


If two seconds is fast, how do we define slow? SOASTA data shows that, while in 2014, conversion rates declined slowly after their peak at six seconds, in 2015, conversions take a sharper downturn. For both mobile and desktop devices, the "poverty line" — the point at which conversion rates dip down and plateau — begins at a page load time of four seconds and establishes itself at six seconds.

Retailers Have No Time to Spare

Huge improvements have been made — and continue to be made — in the mobile web and app space, both in terms of performance and user interface, and these figures illustrate that Americans are embracing the flexibility and portability of shopping from their smartphones. As Americans do more and more of their shopping from mobile devices, having a well-designed, high-functioning mobile website or mobile app is not a luxury for retailers but a mission-critical necessity.

Poor digital performance is now being measured by retailers in terms of lost customers and revenue — and the back to school shopping season, which accounts for 35 percent of the $11.8 billion in yearly sales in the US, is a true testing ground that will determine the winners and the losers in retail.

Ann Ruckstuhl is CMO of SOASTA.

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Back to School: 2 Seconds Will Make or Break Mobile Retailers

Ann Ruckstuhl
Learn more about Akamai

As we enter August, back to school shopping season is in full swing. While research shows that a lot of back to school shopping still happens in brick-and-mortars, Americans are increasingly turning to their computers and mobile devices to stock up on back to school essentials.


According to the NPD Group, last year the e-commerce channel gained $90 million in dollar share growth versus brick-and-mortar, and predictions are that this year the gains could be even higher. As for mobile, new data shows that smartphone purchases for back to school have doubled.

But with this increase in mobile traffic comes a heightened expectation.

In 2014, the page load time that yielded the best conversion rate was six seconds. Now it's two. In other words, consumers will only give an online or mobile store two seconds to work — if a site or app jams or is slow, then it's hasta la vista.

The Continuing Rise of Mobile

SOASTA conducted a year over year comparison study of digital back to school traffic, discovering that in 2014, just over 60 percent of total traffic came from desktop users, while around 33 percent came from smartphones.

Just one year later, for the same set of sites, 65 percent of traffic came from smartphones, while 25 percent came from desktop. And this traffic does not solely consist of people browsing or window shopping on mobile devices only to return home and make purchases from their desktop computers. In 2014, the peak conversion rate for this set of sites was a mere 0.4 percent. Just twelve months later, the peak conversion rate for the same set of sites was over 2.2 percent — that's a change of 450 percent.

Americans Hate Delays

In a Harris poll of more than 2,000 Americans, 91 percent of back to school shoppers said they find making online purchases stressful, with 27 percent citing slow load times and 25 percent frustrated by pages crashing in the middle of a transaction.


If two seconds is fast, how do we define slow? SOASTA data shows that, while in 2014, conversion rates declined slowly after their peak at six seconds, in 2015, conversions take a sharper downturn. For both mobile and desktop devices, the "poverty line" — the point at which conversion rates dip down and plateau — begins at a page load time of four seconds and establishes itself at six seconds.

Retailers Have No Time to Spare

Huge improvements have been made — and continue to be made — in the mobile web and app space, both in terms of performance and user interface, and these figures illustrate that Americans are embracing the flexibility and portability of shopping from their smartphones. As Americans do more and more of their shopping from mobile devices, having a well-designed, high-functioning mobile website or mobile app is not a luxury for retailers but a mission-critical necessity.

Poor digital performance is now being measured by retailers in terms of lost customers and revenue — and the back to school shopping season, which accounts for 35 percent of the $11.8 billion in yearly sales in the US, is a true testing ground that will determine the winners and the losers in retail.

Ann Ruckstuhl is CMO of SOASTA.

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IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

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Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

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Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

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For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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