Website size on sales in eCommerce

Reading Time: 2 minutes

eCommerce history

Every website that wanted to sell anything over the internet was destined to be bound by the technology of the day. Each site visit was a challenge to the website design, as well as technological hurdles to show the content of the webpage faster.

In 1982 Boston Computer Exchange launches it’s website, and a few followed them to open up business into the internet. In the early days most of the page was poorly formatted text with few complementary images and kitschy colors, and average content of those pages was a dozen kilobytes of mostly text.

As the time moved forward we started to introduce more and more images, design improved and somewhat standard UX practices made the Internet more and more modern. That meant that average user needed to download more and more data, to display the web page. The average webpage size is 2.07MB¹. But most eCommerce websites hovers around 6MB of payload.

The waiting game

Internet speed averages at around 113.25 Mbps² this is means that given user can load whopping 14MB of content each second. But with increasing internet speeds, increases expectations of customers.

Average user can wait on a blank website between 3-5 seconds, depending on a scenario, where mobile users are more willing to wait then desktop users.

That mean that any innovative technology in this space, needs to bound to those rules. That is 14MB/s of content for at most 3 seconds, with processing. And this is quite a challenge.

3D Configurators

New and groundbreaking technology is emerging on ecommerce horizons are 3D product configurators. Where instead of displaying picture of a product we showcase a fully movable object(s). Unfortunately this technology until very recently was very hard to introduce to the customers.

In order to achieve high graphical fidelity we need to load a lot of textures and 3D models, which are heavy. It’s not unusual to load 2 024 x 2024 texture ten times to showcase a 3D model with somewhat realistic features. Single such texture is 4 MB alone! This is drastically different approach from small optimized images on current websites.

Numbers in sales

It is proven that users that see 3D content are more willingly to proceed to the purchase then seeing 2D image. Especially if interesting feature for the customer is not visible from given angle on an image. The number of such customers is upwards of 40% in some cases! That’s a huge number!

Unfortunately amount of users who will never see 3D configurator is 90% when we do not show them a model within few seconds.

This can change this year as a lot of revolutionary technology were combined into one product.

Watch the demo of this technology now, as we reached new heights in data compression. 6MB of payload, below 5 seconds?
https://prographers.com/demo/bike

1. https://www.pingdom.com/blog/webpages-are-getting-larger-every-year-and-heres-why-it-matters/
2. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-speeds-by-country