>If I'm spending an hour's pay on something I really want, of course I'll wait 10 seconds for the page to load
When I go to ebay I end up on the landing page. Then I have to enter my product name into the search. Then I will go into search settings and filter out auctions (if I want to order immediately). Then I have to open 3-4 different product listings. That's around 6 page loads. If each page takes 10 seconds then I would have to spend 1 minute doing nothing but waiting for the site to load.
> or if I can't get it to load at all, I'll make a note to try again later from different browser or internet connection.
Isn't it far more likely you are going to buy whatever you want from somewhere else?
>I, and people I know, feel like we buy very little on a whim. Is that unique? Are there whales who buy everything you can put in front of their face, or a different demographic who searches for something to buy and then changes their mind in precisely 850 milliseconds?
It's not about buying. It's about which store you visit when buying something. If your site performs poorly then users might not come to your online store. They may go to a competitor.
The thing about those averages is that they are quite unintuitive. Remember they are averaged over thousands or millions of users. There will always be some users with latency spikes because their device is much slower than usual or simply because servers are running at capacity. They are in the minority and have small effects on average metrics but the latency they see could be very high, maybe even up to 5 times the average. If you can decrease average latency by 1 second then the site might be 5 seconds faster for a minority of users.
>I would accept that like candy in the checkout lane, the profit is small but worth more than the extra effort it takes to put the offering there, but the revenue is small compared to the actual stuff people need to buy
You have to consider that each product listing on an online store is basically an ad. You are not necessarily buying all the products you see but each product listing informs you about what's available in the market place. If pages load faster you end up seeing more "ads" which increases the likely hood that you eventually do buy something.