The average luxury site takes 16.2s to load in urban China. Here’s why this should matter to you.
2 Aug 2011
One of the biggest differences between Chinese consumers and the rest of us is this: they’re spending, and we’re not. In 2009, when the global recession was at an all-time low, China was one of the few places where spending actually increased. The sale of luxury goods alone grew by 16%.
What’s more, people in China are going online at a faster rate every year. This — coupled with the knowledge that international luxury brands are hot-ticket items in mainland China — made it clear to us at Strangeloop that if we wanted to get some understanding of what kind of user experience Chinese consumers are getting from western sites, it would be useful to start by looking at the web performance of leading luxury brands.
The results are available in a report we’ve just released: Why Luxury Websites Are Disappointing Chinese Consumers (And Why This Matters to You).
What we found: Sites are way too slow
Among other things, we found that only 36% of sites offered a Chinese-language version, and only 3 out of 10 had a China-specific URL. But our main finding was that the average site took 16.2 seconds to load, with some taking much longer — up to 58 seconds.
What makes this finding even more compelling is how it bangs up against a recent stat from Gomez, which found that internet users in China are some of the most demanding in the world: 75% say that they will abandon a mobile site after waiting just 3 seconds for it to load.
But at the same time, up to 60% of online shoppers in China reportedly still use Internet Explorer 6, which basically sucks. So there’s a huge gap between user expectations and the capabilities of the platform they’re browsing on. This gap presents a formidable challenge for site owners.
We also learned this: Your CDN won’t necessarily solve your problems
Much like the Alexa retail report we released last year, we found that CDN use didn’t correlate to page speed. Only 29% of the sites we tested used a content delivery network. You might think this explains why sites performed so badly overall, until you look at the five fastest sites. They all loaded in 3 seconds or less, and none of them used a CDN.
Why does the performance of luxury sites matter to all site owners?
By 2015, there will be 520 million online shoppers in China, compared to just 200 million in the U.S. There are huge opportunities for companies to differentiate themselves early by appealing to Chinese consumers. Site owners who get in early, deliver a premium online experience, and grab this market as it’s just beginning to explode, are in an excellent position to emerge as leaders.
(If you like the infographics in this post, you can go here to see a high-res version of the complete set of graphics we created to accompany the report.)
Aug 02, 2011 @ 23:26:35
Nice article, China is really a new big emerging online shopping market. Big E-Commerce players need to rethink their strategy to target Chinese customers. In research report “Why Luxury Websites Are Disappointing Chinese Consumers” you have mentioned top 5 fastest sites. In my tests either they are failing to load or performing really slow except one site’s home page (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110803_M3_17FSW/). While internal page taking 50+ sec (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110803_F8_17FR8/1/details/). May be this report is outdated or you have analysed only home page, but in my opinion only home page is not that important if your rest of the site is slow.
CDN do helps if used sensibly. I also have a site with big user base in China and providing services without any major problem.
Aug 08, 2011 @ 10:07:37
This is a great study. To make the case that luxury sites need to be faster, it would be great if you could compare their load time (16.2 seconds) with the load time of popular Chinese sites. Do you have that data?
How to Bulletproof @font-face Web Fonts | kabayview.com
Oct 18, 2011 @ 11:02:56
[...] connections but live far from your server. A recent report noted that the average luxury site takes 16.2 seconds to load in China. What will your users see while this [...]
How to Bulletproof @font-face Web Fonts | designspora
Oct 25, 2011 @ 12:10:40
[...] connections but live far from your server. A recent report noted that the average luxury site takes 16.2 seconds to load in China. What will your users see while this [...]
Speed tests: How fast are China’s top websites?
Oct 28, 2011 @ 09:05:01
[...] my post about the report, Steve Souders asked a great question: To make the case that luxury sites need to [...]
The Markos Giannopoulos Blog
Dec 25, 2011 @ 10:55:36
[...] The average luxury site takes 16.2s to load in urban China. Here’s why this should matter to you. … One of the biggest differences between Chinese consumers and the rest of us is this: they're spending, and we're not. In 2009, when the global recession was at an all-time low, China was one o… [...]
IEvalEu
Nov 17, 2012 @ 09:12:11
[...] but live far from your server. A recent report noted that the average luxury site takes 16.2 seconds to load in China. What will your users see while this [...]