According to Limelight Network’s “State of the user experience” research report on internet users in Southeast Asia, most consumers will abandon a site that takes too long to load and switch to a competitor’s site when making a purchase.
Nearly half (48%) of Malaysian consumers polled confirmed the trend, saying they would leave a website and go to a competitor if the page took too long to load.
This was important as Malaysia came second only to the Philippines in terms of how much time consumers spent online.
Results showed that 47% of Filipinos spent more than 16 hours a week online. Malaysia was close behind at 42%, Thailand came third at 38% and Singapore followed at 35%.
Commenting on the findings, Limelight regional sales director Jaheer Abbas said Malaysian consumers had high expectations for website performance, especially when it came to e-commerce.
Across the region, 84% of participants expected fast load times no matter what device they were using, but more expected access to be faster on a mobile device (73%) than a desktop or laptop computer (69%).
In terms of content, Malaysians spent the most time on social media sites, which ranked 3.99 out of 5. In second place was watching video content on sites such as YouTube (3.73), followed by reading news (3.54), researching products (3.45), and e-shopping (2.95).
Gaming sites and live video feeds on sports events and the like ranked 2.65 and 2.58, respectively.
Personalised web experiences were ranked higher in Malaysia (68%) than in Singapore (67%).
“The online shopping behaviour of SEA consumers is largely the same – many employ social media while shopping to find out what friends and family think of products they plan to purchase, most will leave a poorly performing site to purchase elsewhere, and the majority want fresh, updated content and fast-performing web experiences regardless of the device they are employing to access the web,” the Limelight report said.
The report was based on a survey of 1,600 randomly chosen consumers in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, aged 18 and over.