60% of Indian shoppers leave app mid-way if it buffers over 10 seconds

New Delhi : As attention spans continue to drop and app marketplaces become more crowded, a new report on Tuesday revealed that 60 per cent of Indian online shoppers would leave an app mid-engagement if they experienced buffering for longer than 10 seconds, and 20 per cent wouldn’t tolerate more than five seconds of buffering before they abandoned or switched apps.

According to the web analytics and observability platform New Relic, apps freezing or crashing as well as misleading app descriptions, were also primary concerns.

"Observability solves these challenges by providing insights into why particular systems are experiencing lag and pinpoints issues before they impact the digital customer experience," said Prasad Rai, New Relic Vice President Sales for India.

"Observability is a game changer for engineering teams because it allows them to proactively analyse and optimise their systems based on logs, metrics, and traces to provide a real-time view of collated data," he added. The report surveyed more than 2,000 Indian online shoppers.

Moreover, the report mentioned that consumers faced various challenges with mobile apps, such as multiple notifications (41 per cent), slow buffering/loading times (38 per cent), and draining batteries (34 per cent).

Multiple notifications were particularly annoying for Android users (41 per cent) compared to iOS users (34 per cent). A slow loading time was one of the biggest reasons for consumers to stop using an app mid-engagement (34 per cent), or even delete it (25 per cent).

It becomes even more problematic during online sales, such as Black Friday, with outages having the potential to impact reputation and revenue, the report said. In addition, consumers expected product delivery times to be swift, that was reflected in their uptake of 15-minute delivery services.

About 55 per cent said they use instant online grocery delivery apps that deliver in 15 minutes or less at least once per week. More than half (59 per cent) of Indian consumers said they use less than three mobile apps for their daily online shopping.

Consumers cited security and privacy (54 per cent), followed by payment failure (50 per cent) and problems processing refunds (45 per cent) as their top three concerns regarding digital payment methods.