While mobile sales are on the rise, they still fall far short of their potential. 55% of all time spent with online retail sites occurs on a mobile device, yet only 16% of all online sales comes via mcommerce. Why is there such a massive gap between how much time consumers spend on mobile retail versus how much money they spend on mobile retail? The answer lies partially with how most sites perform on mobile devices.
I’ve heard some people argue that when people visit a retail site on their phone, they’re just browsing, not actually shopping. This may be true some of the time, but we know that many mobile users are filling up their shopping carts. We know this because we know that they’re abandoning these carts at an alarmingly high rate compared to desktop shoppers. The abandonment rate for mobile shopping carts is 97%, compared to 70-75% for desktop carts. We also know that performance is a significant abandonment factor. Slow pages are the number one user complaint around mobile sites, ranking even higher than site crashes. And when faced with a bad mobile shopping experience, 43% will go to a competitor's site next.
So how fast do sites need to be to satisfy mobile shoppers? 64% of smartphone users expect sites to load in less than 4 seconds or less.
This week at Radware, we've released our annual mobile performance report, the 2013 State of the Union for Mobile Ecommerce Performance. Every year, we study the performance of top online retailers to see how they measure up against user expectations. I shared some of our key findings in this post on the Radware blog, and today I want to share a poster version of the infographics we created to accompany the report. (You can download a shareable high-res version here.)