Ecommerce Times: What Web Performance Metrics Really Mean

Despite the frequent criticism coming from ecommerce metrics companies, spinning out press releases about commerce sites losing 20 percent of their customers, defining a "lost transaction" is an exercise fraught with squishy interpretations.

Many "lost" transactions actually ocur when customers merely seek pricing information, without the intention of purchase. Still other "lost" customers actually go on to purchase the items in their virtual shopping carts, but only after the arbitrarily set time limit that some metrics companies employ - some with limits as low as 25 seconds per page.