Billions Lost to Slow Sites: Catchpoint Report Reveals Top Global Retailers Risk Revenue with Poor Digital Experiences

Real-world web performance analysis of the NRF Top 50 retailers exposes the costly gap between what dashboards report and what shoppers actually experience.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new benchmark report from Catchpoint, the global leader in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), shows that some of the world’s biggest retailers are leaving billions on the table because their websites are too slow or unstable.

Global ecommerce is set to hit $1T+ in digital transformation spend by 2032, and retailers who fail to meet customer expectations risk being permanently excluded from that growth. Catchpoint’s findings make clear that digital experience, not brand size, separates leaders from laggards. Aldi and Action prove that smaller retailers can outpace giants, while Apple shows that even the biggest brands can deliver speed and stability when they make it a priority.

The 2025 Retail Website Performance Benchmark Report analyzed the NRF Top 50 Global Retailers by testing performance using Catchpoint’s Global Agent Network, made up of over 3,000 agents worldwide. This approach compared results from the controlled environments enterprises often use to test their apps (a few nodes in a cloud datacenter) with intelligent agents on the last-mile ISPs and wireless networks real shoppers rely on. This contrast reveals a crucial blind spot: the gap between how retailers believe their sites are performing in lab conditions and the reality customers face in the wild.

Key findings include:

• Big revenue doesn’t equal speed: Some of the world’s top 10 retailers, with tens of billions in annual sales, struggle with slow sites. One global giant with $50B+ in sales takes 9.4 seconds to load its homepage and is potentially losing $3.4B–$24.1B annually in missed conversions.
• The reality gap: Cloud monitoring showed Aldi’s site loading in just 350 ms, but real shoppers in Philadelphia waited up to 1,932 ms — nearly two seconds longer. The same site, tested at the same time, delivered radically different experiences depending on where performance was measured.
• Smaller brands are using performance as a competitive advantage: Digital speed and consistency are proving to be the great equalizer. European retailer Action, with just ~$15B in revenue, ranked #2 overall with a near-perfect 99/100, showing that mid-sized players can go toe to toe with industry heavyweights by focusing on speed.
• Not all customers see the same site: H&M’s homepage loaded in 2 seconds in Finland but dragged to 28.7 seconds in Japan, a 1,363% difference depending on location and network
• ‘Always on’ availability ≠ an ‘always good’ experience: 16 retailers, including Walmart, Target and Tesco, had near-perfect uptime yet still scored below 70, showing that “being online” isn’t enough when users face slow or unstable pages.
• Perfect metrics can mislead: The study shows that even when retailers appear to have strong technical metrics like uptime and fast response times, customers may still face sluggish or unstable sites. Brands like Tesco looked “healthy” in dashboards but still delivered slow, frustrating customer experiences.

“Retailers are investing billions in digital transformation, but too many are blind to the performance gaps their customers actually feel,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “Your dashboards may be green, but if your shoppers are waiting 10 seconds on mobile in Tokyo or São Paulo, you’re losing trust, loyalty, and most importantly sales, especially headed into one of the busiest times of the year.”

“Retail growth in 2025 will be won on the last mile of the Internet. Our data shows brands can’t rely on uptime and averages — customers feel the slowest path, not the best one. Leaders are measuring what shoppers actually experience and fixing it before it hits conversion.” — Dritan Suljoti, Catchpoint, Chief Product and Technology Officer.

The report also shows stark regional divides. Shoppers in Asia and Africa wait up to 3x longer than those in North America and Europe for the same sites to load, highlighting digital infrastructure gaps that only advanced monitoring can uncover.

To learn more, download the entire report here. (No registration required)

About Catchpoint

In today’s exacting digital age, performance is paramount. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs all rely on Catchpoint to ensure high performance and digital resilience by catching issues across the Internet Stack before they impact their customers, workforce or digital experiences. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers Internet Synthetics, RUM, BGP, Tracing, performance optimization, high-fidelity data, and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics derived from the world’s largest, most detailed, active observability network.