When your ecommerce website isn’t up to par performance-wise, this can have severe negative effect on sales.  Potential buyers are positively allergic to any of the following scenarios:

1.  Your website graphics are painfully slow to display.

This is a major no-no for any ecommerce site.  Would-be buyers rely primarily on the product description and the accompanying image when they choose to buy anything from your site.  They absolutely need to be able to view product images as quickly as possible.  Often, too, they make a product comparison before deciding on what to buy.  They need to view in succession two or more products or an entire catalog.  Product images should be rendered fast on their displayed pages or else the shopping experience leaves a lot to be desired.

2.  Your site freezes or becomes unavailable while the visitor is browsing.

In a physically-present shop, you don’t close your store while customers are still shopping.  It’s the same thing with your ecommerce store.  Your web store should be available whenever site visitors come visiting.  None of those unpleasant freezes or crashes.  Not only do events like these interrupt users from browsing products or concluding their transactions, it also gives a bad image to your ecommerce store — one of unreliability.  Some users even take such untimely interruptions to mean that a site has been compromised, has a malware or a virus, or is being phished.  When visitors think that of your site, the chances that they’ll come back are pretty low at this point.

3.  Site buyers run a gauntlet before they can checkout.

Ecommerce sites can get over-enthusiastic in their desire to multi-sell their products.  The way to the checkout page can be littered with add-on offers, promotional discounts, think-about-it packages, and other last-minute enticements.  These might annoy buyers to the point that they will have to abandon the checkout altogether.

Site performance is a function of web infrastructure and design.  Infrastructure involves the hardware, database, storage, network and application layers that power your website — often the territory of your web hosting team.  The performance of these infrastructure layers is defined in your Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your web host.  Any deviation from the expected performance should be resolved.  Or you can shop for more speed, bandwidth, or space, depending on your need, or as your ecommerce store grows.  As to website design wherein scenario 3) falls into, the design should be streamlined to avoid shopping and checkout hassles for your customers.