Optimizing Web performance for mobile shoppers

The holiday shopping season is underway, and retailers have a new Web population they need to keep happy and satisfied: mobile users.

It’s not the first year that consumers have used smartphones and other mobile devices to browse for products, compare prices and make purchases online, but it’s the first year the population has been sizable enough to get most retailers’ attention.

“This is definitely the heaviest interest we’ve seen in mobile so far. We’re finally seeing a proliferation of devices, and consumers nowadays expect to be able to get convenient access to product information, information about retailers, and even shopping through their mobile devices,” says Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Web performance monitoring firm Gomez (which Compuware acquired recently).

This is the first year that Gomez has been tracking retailers’ mobile site performance (response time and availability) during the holiday shopping season and comparing it to the traditional Web experience.

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The holiday shopping season is underway, and retailers have a new Web population they need to keep happy and satisfied: mobile users.

It’s not the first year that consumers have used smartphones and other mobile devices to browse for products, compare prices and make purchases online, but it’s the first year the population has been sizable enough to get most retailers’ attention.

“This is definitely the heaviest interest we’ve seen in mobile so far. We’re finally seeing a proliferation of devices, and consumers nowadays expect to be able to get convenient access to product information, information about retailers, and even shopping through their mobile devices,” says Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Web performance monitoring firm Gomez (which Compuware acquired recently).

This is the first year that Gomez has been tracking retailers’ mobile site performance (response time and availability) during the holiday shopping season and comparing it to the traditional Web experience.

During the first big shopping period of the season (Black Friday through Cyber Monday), Gomez found that on average, mobile retail Web sites loaded 1.5 seconds slower than retailers’ traditional home pages. Of the 14 mobile retail sites monitored, page load speeds ranged from 2.18 seconds at best to almost 6 seconds at worst, with 3.7 seconds the average.

BestBuy.com performed the strongest in terms of response time and availability, but the wide discrepancy in mobile Web site response times suggests that retailers need to work at optimizing mobile Web performance, Poepsel says.

“Consumers told us that they expect those experiences to be as fast if not faster than what they’re used to on the traditional Web,” he says. “You’re willing to accept a little bit of a less rich environment, because you’re on a mobile device, but you still expect it to be fast.”

Looking ahead, the demand for mobile Web options is only going to increase. “In 2010 I expect expanded interest on the part of consumers, and I think the most savvy retailers will play that to their fullest advantage.”

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