Nike and Adidas rank near the bottom in customer digital experience, bleeding up to $425M annually in downtime losses, while challenger brands like Fila, Under Armour, and New Balance surge ahead

A new benchmark report from Catchpoint, the global leader in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), finds that the world’s largest athletic footwear and apparel companies are losing hundreds of millions due to slow, unreliable, or misleading digital experiences.

According to Fortune Business Insights, global sports retail is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.84% through 2032, but brands failing to deliver performance are paying the price everywhere, from lost online sales to damaged customer loyalty.

The 2025 Athletic Footwear and Apparel Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed the top 20 brands by revenue, measuring performance from 120+ global monitoring agents, and ranking them using the Digital Experience Score, a true reflection of what real customers experience when they go online. This approach revealed 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 brands are losing out to smaller challengers: Market leaders like Nike and Adidas ranked near the bottom for customer experience, while nimble brands like Fila, Under Armour, and New Balance delivered industry-best digital experiences. Nike’s $12.1B online revenue stream is threatened by lagging performance and reliability, with potentially over $200 million lost annually to downtime alone.
• Downtime and sluggish sites destroy loyalty: Adidas’ uptime clocked in at only 92.2%, far below the 99.9% reliability standard for enterprise sites. That's about 56 hours offline every month, potentially costing up to $19 million monthly or $225 million annually.
• Most brands aren’t meeting industry standards: Only three brands — out of 20 —clear the industry’s three-second page load time threshold, while the median site takes 6.6 seconds to load, more than double the recommended standard. In fact, 70% of brands exceed five seconds.
• Technical dashboards are misleading: Nearly half (43%) of brands shifted five or more places between technical metrics and real user experience. Brands green on dashboards, like Decathlon and Lululemon, ranked poorly for actual user experience.
• Cloud monitoring misses the mark: Study revealed cloud tests performed in controlled environments often tell a different story than real-world results. Shoppers connecting via local broadband and mobile networks waited 10–15 times longer than cloud testing suggested, with actual speed varying widely by ISP, region, and device — even in the same city.

“Brands are investing billions in digital transformation, but most remain blind to performance gaps only real customers feel,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “Your dashboards may look healthy, but if shoppers are waiting 20 seconds for a homepage to load in Tokyo, you’re losing sales everywhere, especially heading into peak season.”

“Retailers must optimize for users, not just infrastructure. That requires monitoring from every network that touches a sale. Brands that master last-mile monitoring understand the real reasons shoppers stay or leave.” Gerardo Dada, Field CTO, Catchpoint.

With digital influence now driving 62% of all U.S. retail sales, heading toward 70% in just two years, every second and every customer matters. The deeper financial impact on top brands, and what it means for the future of retail, is fully explored in Catchpoint’s latest benchmark report.

To learn more, read the entire report. (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.

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