With e-commerce opening up unexplored avenues along the retail landscape, online retailers are facing a wide range of challenges. Not only must they provide an interesting and compelling shopping experience, they also must make that experience fast and reliable.

Almost half of all online shoppers say that they are more likely to abandon a webpage that takes more than 2 seconds to load. The reason is often very simple: we live in an age of instant gratification and customers don’t like to wait.