Mobile commerce may have been more popular than the Thanksgiving turkey for the start of this holiday shopping season. Black Friday saw 16.3 percent of all online sales being completed through mobile devices and on Cyber Monday those same figures rose to 18 percent and increase of over 70 percent from last year.
But according to VentureBeat’s John Koetsier, mobile commerce is being held back by its lack of speed.
But there’s a dirty little secret that mobile commerce has been keeping. It’s slow — deadly slow.
Koetsier points to information from Aaron Rudger, mobile manager for Keynote, an internet and mobile cloud testing & monitoring company who says mobile is lagging when it comes to page load time with the average retail site taking over 18 seconds, or about twice as slow as normal.
“This is quite detrimental and will certainly impact a customer’s experience negatively and can easily motivate a shopper to abandon a site altogether or go to a competitor’s mobile shopping site,” said Rudger, who attributes the problems to a lack of preparations, “It appears many leading retailers have failed to do the rigorous testing mobile sites require in order to accommodate increasing numbers of mobile holiday shoppers each year.
“Retailers put significant revenue at risk by not doing the requisite amount of mobile testing and mobile load testing to succeed and deliver an optimal experience during the holidays,” he said. “The amount of holiday shopping now taking place on smartphones has simply grown too large for retailers to ignore. Simply put, retailers ignore the mobile experience at their own peril.”
It appear that the mobile consumer may be set to ignore the slow load times though as a recent study by Sybase 365 and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), shows that 87 percent of consumers will be making holiday purchases via their mobile devices this year.
Will you be doing your holiday shopping on your mobile device this year? How important are few extra seconds of page load time to you?
