Consumers browsing or shopping on the mobile web this holiday season will often find slower response times than when visiting conventional e-commerce sites, according to Gomez, which has published a new benchmark that ranks the mobile web performance of some of the nation’s top mobile retailers.
Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 15, Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware Corp., monitored the mobile web performance of the home pages of 14 retailers. Gomez tested the sites from different geographies and mobile carriers to measure their response times and availability when accessed from a Motorola RazrV3 phone. The Gomez Mobile Retail Web Performance Benchmark found that Amazon.com’s mobile site loaded fastest at 2.8 seconds and had top availability at 99.86%.
The new benchmark found that the average response time for the mobile web sites tested was 4.7 seconds—more than 50% slower than the average response times of the same retailers’ conventional web sites, according to Gomez’s current Retail Home Page Web Performance Benchmark. The benchmark also showed that retailers’ mobile home page availability, or uptime, averaged 98.74%. By comparison, the average availability for the conventional retail web sites was 99.76%.
While some mobile web users might accept mobile web sites performing slower, given the bandwidth of wireless networks, a recent Gomez survey of 1,000 mobile web users found the majority actually expect mobile sites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phones compared with their home or work computers. The same survey also revealed that two out of three people have encountered problems accessing mobile web sites, with slow load times their chief complaint. Significantly, 85% said they are only willing to retry a mobile web site two times or less if it does not work initially, and 40% said they’d likely visit a competitor’s mobile web site instead.
“Let’s say a retailer doesn’t do well with their mobile performance and they lose a customer to a retailer with great mobile performance,” says Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez. “That retailer is not just losing that one transaction, that customer may now be on the other retailer’s list, may have had a great experience, that retailer may have just lost a big chunk of the lifetime value of that customer because of poor mobile performance.”
Working on the mobile channel’s customer experience today is crucial, Poepsel adds.
“Now is the time to really focus on mobile. Consumers have voted and they’re with mobile. And retail is a big part of that,” he says. “There was debate a couple years ago about the form factor being too limiting. That debate is over, and mobile has won. With the emergence of new smartphones and the ability to extend the retail experience anytime, anywhere, getting the customer experience right is crucial and there is a lot of work to do.”
The following are the 14 retailers measured in the Gomez Mobile Retail Web Performance Benchmark followed by their response time and availability:
Amazon.com, 2.85 seconds, 99.86%
m.QVC.com, 2.94 seconds, 99.84%
m.Newegg.com, 3.33 seconds, 99.62%
Mobile.Overstock.com, 3.36 seconds, 99.49%
m.BestBuy.com, 3.44 seconds, 99.46%
m.Walmart.com, 3.84 seconds, 99.09%
VictoriasSecret2go.com, 4.93 seconds, 99.25%
BN.com (Barnes & Noble), 5.23 seconds, 99.59%
Nordstrom.mobi, 5.44 seconds, 98.95%
m.MusiciansFriend.com, 5.73 seconds, 99.58%
1800Flowers.mobi, 5.92 seconds, 97.66%
Sears2go.com, 6.07 seconds, 96.28%
Mobile.Buy.com, 6.22 seconds, 95.47%
m.Target.com, 6.96 seconds, 98.17%
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