Mobile Web Performance Erratic At Best: Nordstrom, QVC Good; Levi, REI Bad
Written by Frank HayesSeptember 2nd, 2010
Just how out-of-control does mobile commerce get when you're creating M-Commerce sites for different smartphones on different carriers? Pretty wild, according to the numbers from a new survey of retail M-Commerce sites by Web-metrics company Gomez. The best sites (Petco, QVC, Nordstrom) perform consistently well; the worst (Levi Strauss, REI, American Eagle Outfitters) always have mediocre availability. But in between, it's chaotic: Content that shows up in seconds on one phone can take half a minute on another, and a site that's 99 percent available on one carrier can drop to 89 percent on a different one.
Tuning E-Commerce site performance for multiple browsers is an old problem, of course. But programming is just the beginning of the mobile performance problem. It also depends on smartphone hardware, which varies widely in horsepower, and mobile carriers, whose performance can change dramatically if a user moves literally just a few feet away. That makes the puzzle hugely more complex--at a time when retailers can't afford to avoid that complexity.
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One Comment | Read Mobile Web Performance Erratic At Best: Nordstrom, QVC Good; Levi, REI Bad
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September 2nd, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Good article, thanks.
One possibility that comes to mind to level the playing field, or make the shopping experience ‘handset agnostic,’ is that most smartphones are coming equipped with WiFi. Retailers *can* control that experience by offering highly available, reliable and good performing WiFi connectivity to their in-store shoppers. Borrowing from the business hotel market, one could be presented with a Welcome screen from the retailer – being directed straight to your mobile home page. You even have the option to restrict access beyond your own web site, but assuming you don’t, at least you have ‘home field advantage.’