Don’t keep your Internet customers waiting too long at the (virtual) front door

One of the primary e-commerce challenges on the World Wide Web is when users experience intolerably long waits for a website's homepage to load. Zona Research, Inc. estimates that over 4 billion in lost revenue is due to slow downloads over the Internet. When the loading time of a homepage exceeds the maximum amount of time that a Web user is willing to wait, a Web user will either redirect the web-browser to an alternative (e. g. , competitor's) website or quit using the Web; an opportunity, at the moment and perhaps forever, is lost to not only serve, influence, or interact with, a potential customer, but also to advance the growth of e-commerce. Given the important role of a homepage as a portal to a website or to a host of websites, it is critical that a homepage design consider not only appearance and functionality, but also loading time. The Internet industry has been devoting significant attention to solving the waiting time problem with approaches that are technical or operational in nature, with those most promising being extremely expensive and time consuming to employ (e. g. , fiber optic cable). These approaches have not, up to this point in time, yielded the desired results. This research describes a complementary marketing approach to reducing the negative impact of the waiting time problem; one that is based on the psychological theorizing of “anchoring and adjustment, ” with implications that would be relatively inexpensive to implement. In experiments where all Web users experienced the same actual wait for a homepage to load, those exposed to a shorter waiting time anchor, both perceived as shorter the waiting time for, and evaluated as higher the quality of, a homepage; and when the waiting time anchor was less than the actual waiting time, the perceived waiting time was less than the actual waiting time. In addition, those exposed to the smaller waiting time anchor were more likely to continue searching the associated website as opposed to searching a different website.