Every 100ms of latency cost Amazon 1% of sales
Unsourced Confidence: medium
No primary data found; the trail ends in a roundup, a disowned quote or a circular citation.
- Commonly cited as
- "Amazon found every 100ms of latency costs 1% in sales"
- True origin
- Greg Linden (ex-Amazon) blog post and slides, 2006, about a pre-2002 A/B test — No published data
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- 2006 (anecdote about pre-2002 test)
- Data as of
- 2006 (anecdote about pre-2002 test)
- Last checked
- What the source says
In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
- Method & sample
- No dataset, sample, test length or significance was published; the '1%' wording comes from a later presentation slide, as traced by the source.
- Drift between quote and source
- Precision: 'substantial drops' became an exact 1% per 100ms
- Date: 20+ year-old test quoted as current
- Interest
- n/a
Safe rephrasing
An early-2000s internal Amazon A/B test reportedly found small page delays reduced revenue; no data was published.
Sources we opened
Machine-readable: /api/claims/amazon-100ms-latency-1-percent-sales.json · Last checked 2026-10-16