Amazon found back in 2006 that every 100ms page load time resulted in -1% sales, and considering that they're talking about bloat yeah, it'd be just from the increase load time/customers lost.

That was what I got from the article too. That the 700k was lost opportunity due to a poor user experience, not that it actually was them spending more money.

Often, it boils down to one common problem: Too much client-side JavaScript. This is not a cost-free error. One retailer realized they were losing $700,000 a year per kilobyte of JavaScript, Russell said.

“You may be losing all of the users who don’t have those devices because the experience is so bad,” he said.

They just didn't link to the one retailer's context. But it's "bring back old reddit" energy directed at everything SPA-ish.

edit to give it a little personal context: I was stuck on geosat internet for a little while and could not use amazon's site across the connection. I'm not sure if they're the retailer mentioned. But the only way I could make it usable was to apply the ublock rule *.images-amazon.com/*.js^ described here.

What really stunk about it was that if you're somewhere where geosat is/was the only option, then you're highly dependent on online retail. And knowing how to manage ublock rules is not exactly widespread knowledge.

One retailer realized they were losing $700,000 a year per kilobyte of JavaScript, Russell said.

It’s a retailer so definitely lost sales or conversions