Downloading and Configuring a Car?

Imagine that you are looking at buying a new car.  You’ve seen countless TV commercials, researched your favorites online, talked to friends and it’s finally time to venture into the showroom for a test drive.  Once in the showroom, you find the model you’ve been checking out for months and are able to catch the eye of an eager salesperson.  You confidently greet the sales person by proclaiming that you’d like to take this one on a test drive.  Most of us have been in this situation.

Now imagine how things might go if the salesperson asked you to have a seat in the lounge to wait as they “downloaded” the car from another location.  After 45 minutes of reading dated magazines and drinking bad coffee, the salesperson reappears and announces that your car is now ready for the test drive!  You follow him over to the car only to find out that you cannot fit your 6’ 3” frame into the driver’s seat.  Undeterred, the salesperson offers you an FAQ and a 1-800 number where you can troubleshoot your apparent “configuration issue.”  At this point you’ve had enough and decide to take your search for a new car elsewhere.

We can all agree that the above is an absurd scenario, but what if we shifted things a bit and thought about the software buying process.  All of a sudden this doesn’t seem so absurd.  In fact, it may actually be a common experience.

Changing Expectations

As both B2C and B2B software purchases migrate to a “self service” mode, people’s pre and post-purchase expectations have changed.  People’s expectations for speed can greatly impact their satisfaction, likelihood to buy and intent to recommend. Kissmetrics’ study How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line, reveals that 40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.  79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from that site again.  And 44% of online shoppers will tell friends about a bad online experience.

Impact to the Bottom Line

When you apply these stats to your bottom line, Kissmetrics calculates that “a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”  For an “e-commerce site making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost the company $2.5M in lost sales every day.”

As the line between B2B and B2C shopping experiences continues to merge, think about how a slow or complicated trial download experience could impact your company’s bottom line.

See how Trial.io can help you deliver fast and seamless downloads of your software to prospects.