For How Long Will Consumers Forgive Mobile Slowness?
Written by Evan SchumanJanuary 7th, 2010
With its latest batch of M-Commerce performance benchmarks being published, online performance tracking firm Gomez noticed that the average mobile response time of major retailers is 3.7 seconds. That contrasts with an average response time of 2.2 seconds for those same chains' Web sites and an industry ideal time of two seconds. But are those differences meaningful? Indeed, even that two-second target is suspect. To make it meaningful, wouldn't it have to factor in the consumer's demographics? Is a 61-year-old corporate CEO going to have the same time sensitivities as 31-year-old unemployed painter? What about a teen-ager?
The truth is that the influence of age, income and background are trivial—in terms of projecting how long that person will wait for a page to display—when compared with something much more personal: Why is that person trying to access that Web page right now? If they're in an airport trying to find an alternative to a snowed-in flight, they have little choice but to be patient. Or a 16-year-old trying to download a new hot song. And if it's a consumer merely browsing to kill time? Almost any delay will make that consumer flee.
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One Comment | Read For How Long Will Consumers Forgive Mobile Slowness?
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
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January 10th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
The apparent (but incomplete. read on…) message is clear: capacity planning is very inconsistent across the industry. Performance under load is predicated on the site’s architecture and infrastructure. While money (and expertise) can address infrastructure bottlenecks, only foresight can produce a solid architecture that will help a system scale and distribute its load. Even the “cloud” is not a magic bullet. Cloud instances are virtualized server instances, nothing more, you still have to load-balance them.
But we can’t only lay the blame on mobile sites. Mobile devices are much more limited than modern computers both in terms of hardware and available bandwidth. Take SSL/HTTPS for example, the trusted “handshake” that takes place between the client and server is barely noticeable on a computer running a web browser. On the other hand, this operation (with requires several round trips) can take 3 seconds or more on the latest blackberry running on a 3G network.
So yes mobile sites could be faster but let’s remember that the device and the network themselves are bottlenecks.