3 reasons we're excited Google Fiber is coming to Austin

Published on April 11th, 2013 by David Callaway

In case you haven?t heard the news yet, Google has selected beautiful Austin, Texas to be the next lucky recipient of Google Fiber.

As a company half-headquartered in Austin, we?re excited about getting the sweet, blazing-hot speed of gigabit internet. And it?s not just so funny cat videos will stream smoothly in HD ? super-fast internet is a big deal for e-commerce. As high-speed connections become more common, it?ll be easier to sell, easier to buy and easier to start internet-based companies that enable both.

Good for online retailers

As we?ve discussed before, 67% of consumers interviewed rated image quality as ?very important? when deciding to purchase. Faster internet speeds mean it won?t take as long for large images to download, which means merchants can feel free to get crazy with high-quality images all over their sites.

Even more importantly, video has a huge impact on online sales. Scientific Facts:

• A video makes it 53 times more likely for a webpage to get a front-page Google result
• They have a 41% higher clickthrough rate in search results than plain text
• Consumers are 64-85% more likely to purchase after watching a video

And as more and more people get access to a fast connection, online store owners can really ramp up the use of HD videos to show off their products, engage shoppers and increase sales.

And all that doesn?t even take into account how much easier it is to run an online business when you have access to a stable, fast internet connection. It will take less time to perform all the routine tasks required to enter and update products.

Good for shoppers

And of course online shoppers will also benefit from having faster-loading pages, images and videos. According to this awesome infographic from KISSmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow-loading stores? Ain?t nobody got time for that.

So consumers will benefit from a fast shopping experience. ?But wait,? you might be saying, ?won?t that also help online retailers?? That is correct. Everybody wins!

Good for startups

Austin already has a solid startup scene, but access to a connection 100 times faster than regular broadband tends to draw the People of the Internet. Kansas City, the first city to get Google Fiber, is already seeing a bit of a startup boom. Companies are relocating to new neighborhoods and even moving in from different cities ? and the service isn?t even available yet.

Once Google Fiber is in Austin, we?ll have a stronger community of smart, ambitious, creative people building innovative businesses. Since we integrate with a number of those kind of businesses, we can?t wait to see what comes out of it.

Plus, faster upload and download speeds create the potential for some game-changing new business models that may have been impossible or at the very least insane-sounding just a few years ago. Kind of like the idea of running a multi-million dollar online business at home from a single laptop.

Speaking of awesome videos

Here?s one Google made that highlights some of the reasons we love Austin.

Source: http://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/3-reasons-why-were-incredibly-excited-about-google-fiber-coming-to-austin/

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