Mobile has been a buzzword for many years now and, with the holiday season upon us, it will play an important role for customers and retailers alike. But according to a new report by Radware, “2013 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance,” mobile users are unhappy with mobile site performance that has led to a staggering 97% abandonment rates in online shopping carts.
With mobile sales on the rise, mobile sites are still falling short of their performance potential, which can critically impact potential business revenue for the holidays, according to the report. By the end of 2013, mobile commerce is expected to generate 16% of all online sales, an increase in 68% from 2012.
Yet despite the promise of mobile, the majority of online retailers are failing to meet user demands for pages that load in four seconds or less.
“While mobile sales are on the rise, they still fall far short of their potential,” Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist, Radware, said in a press release. “More than half of all time spent with online retail sites occur on a mobile device, and we’re investigating why there is such a massive gap between how much time consumers spend on mobile retail versus how much money they spend on mobile retail. Slow pages are the number one user complaint around mobile sites, ranking even higher than site crashes. Our findings are a wake-up call for online retailers to closely examine mobile web performance and optimize in anticipation of the holiday shopping season.”
Radware’s Mobile Ecommerce Performance study measured and tracked the performance of the top 100 U.S. retail websites (as ranked by Alexa.com) – both the full and mobile versions – across several popular mobile devices. Conducted over a four-week period, the study subjected the home page of each site to a series of page speed tests over 4G and Wifi networks, and calculated the median results for metrics such as load time and number of resources.
Here are the key findings from the “2013 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance” include:
The median page loads in 7.84 seconds (full site) – Only 2 out of 100 sites loaded in less than four seconds, while 20 sites took 10+ seconds to load
The median mobile site took 4.33 seconds to load – While this was 44% faster than the full site, it falls somewhat short of mobile users’ stated load time threshold of four seconds
Mobile sites are on the rise, but 1 in 5 don’t allow visitors to access the full site – 80% of companies have a mobile-specific site, up from 76% in 2012. Of these mobile sites, 79% offer a link that allows users to view the full site, while 21% do not offer full site access
Even tablet-using shoppers get sent to the mobile site – Most sites serve the full site to the iPad, and the few don’t offer a link to the full site. However, almost one-third of sites serve the mobile site to the Android tablet, and 3% do not allow
Android tablet shoppers to access the full site at all Android smartphones outperformed iOS* – Performance varied widely among smartphones. Median load times across the five devices tested ranged from 3.06 seconds for the Samsung Galaxy Note to 11.35 seconds for the iPhone 4
The Android tablet outperformed the iPad* – The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 served pages 33% faster over Wifi than the iPad 2. This finding was consistent across most of the sites tested
“The mobile web is a difficult environment for retailers to navigate,” Everts added. “Building web pages that perform well across all devices, browsers and connection types remains a significant challenge for site owners, and serving an ideal experience to all visitors is difficult.”