Why Speed Is the Untapped Growth Lever in Ecommerce

Shawn O’Neill and Michael Dickerson on conversion drag, budget reallocation, and why AR might be killing your homepage load time.

In the rush to add more AI, more 3D, and more personalization, brands are missing something basic—and critical: speed.

That’s the message from Shawn O’Neill, Founder of SpeedSense (now part of Yottaa), and Michael Dickerson, CEO of Yottaa, in their Shoptalk 2025 interview. While other sessions focused on innovation, theirs was about foundations—and the billions left on the table when performance isn’t treated as a core business metric.

The Invisible Tax of a Slow Site

Speed is rarely someone’s job. It doesn’t sit in a line item, and no one owns a “site speed budget.” But it touches every team: engineering, marketing, ecommerce, ops.

And it’s costing money.

In Yottaa’s latest annual index study—analyzing over 500 million sessions and 70+ third-party technologies—they found that reducing mobile load time by just one second can improve conversion rates by 3%. Multiply that across channels and campaigns, and the upside becomes enormous.

The Wrong ROI Debate

Shawn O’Neill has seen the AI hype cycle before. He likens it to the blockchain buzz of 2022—brimming with potential, but often solving problems that don’t exist yet.

“We're not saying don’t invest in innovation,” he noted. “We’re saying: get the fundamentals right first.”

That means understanding which third-party scripts are dragging performance, which UX features are adding weight, and how first-party code is actually behaving in the wild—not just in staging environments.

Where to Start? Not on the Homepage

One of the most tactical pieces of advice came from O’Neill: don’t put your heaviest experiences above the fold.

Many brands today load AR try-ons, high-res video, or 3D carousels before a user even scrolls. On a 10-year-old phone over a slow mobile network, that kills engagement before it begins.

The fix? Push complexity deeper into the journey—after the user is engaged. Let performance set the pacing for innovation, not the other way around.

Budgeting Through Performance Wins

One of the most surprising points: performance can fund innovation. When a site is properly optimized, it often leads to savings in:

• CDN costs

• Backend infrastructure

• Abandoned cart recovery

• Third-party tech bloat

Dickerson shared how many Yottaa clients discover “money falling out the bottom of the process” once they make the site faster. And in an uncertain economy, that’s capital worth reallocating—especially as teams prioritize holiday readiness.

Platforms Aren’t the Problem—Accumulated Tech Debt Is

Contrary to vendor claims, most modern ecommerce platforms (Salesforce, Shopify, Adobe) are performant enough on their own. The real issues come from years of accumulated plug-ins, legacy tracking scripts, and experimentation platforms that were implemented to spec—but not with speed in mind.

Yottaa’s current roadmap, accelerated by the SpeedSense acquisition, focuses on sequencing both third-party and first-party code—a move that gives visibility into the full conversion path and performance drag.

Performance as Strategic Discipline

It’s easy to delay speed work. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t come with a big campaign. But as Dickerson emphasized, holiday planning happens now—and you don’t want to finish Q3 with new features that inadvertently slow your site just as peak traffic arrives.

The opportunity is simple: faster sites convert better. Period. And no customer has ever complained a page loaded too quickly.

What Yottaa + SpeedSense Are Teaching the Industry

⚡ Performance isn’t a developer issue—it’s a revenue issue
📉 Every second of delay is a silent tax on conversion
🧮 Site speed work can generate budget for future innovation
🧪 Run performance experiments like you run UX tests
📦 Speed is foundational—build your VR and AI on top, not first

Disclaimer: The above podcast episode was generated using AI based on an interview transcript. While the content remains true to the original conversation, the voices, tone, and delivery were synthesized and do not represent actual recordings of the speakers. This AI-generated format is intended to enhance accessibility and provide an alternative way to engage with the discussion.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with Shoptalk.

ClickZ is a Contentive publication in the Events division