Affiliations: Department of Decision and Information Technology, College of Commerce and Finance, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085, USA
Abstract: With the extensive growth of the Internet and electronic commerce, the issue of how users behave when confronted with long download times is important. This paper investigates Web switching behavior. The paper describes experiments where users were subjected to artificially delayed Web page download times to study the impact of Web site wait times on switching behavior. Two hypotheses were tested. First, that longer wait times will result in increased switching behavior. The implication being that users become frustrated with long waiting times and choose to go elsewhere. Second, that users who switch will benefit, in terms of decreased download times, from their decision to switch.
Keywords: Internet, World Wide Web, electronic commerce, bandwidth, response time, download time
