Mobile Commerce Response Times Slower Than Cyber Weekend 2012

mobile-transaction-300While many merchants optimized their ecommerce sites for growing Cyber Weekend demand, Compuware APM says the question remains as to whether they have been prepared for the onslaught anticipated from mobile consumers on smartphones and tablets.

[CLICK HERE for Multichannel Merchant’s Cyber Weekend 2013 coverage]

With overall traffic up compared with Thanksgiving, users were experiencing average page response times around 8 seconds on both iPads and iPhones, according to Compuware APM. To answer the question as to whether or not retailers were prepared to handle mobile traffic, reviewing Black Friday results show that many retailers were not be totally prepared for the spikes in mobile traffic on Black Friday.

“With traffic spiking early on Black Friday and again around 8:00 pm, the average page response times remained around 8 seconds,” said says Steven Dykstra of Compuware APM’s Benchmarks Division. “Our data shows that an average page response time over 6 seconds increase page abandonment rate from 12% to over 20%, which will significantly impact many retailers revenue this holiday season.”

Couch commerce:

Black Friday: 12:00 am – 12:00 pm

  • traffic up 37% over Thanksgiving day
  • iPad traffic was up 31%  from Thanksgiving
  • iPhone traffic up 40% from Thanksgiving
  • iPad users were seeing 8.27 second page response times
  • iPhone users were seeing 7.4 second page response times

Black Friday: 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm

  • traffic slowed slightly from up 37% earlier in day but still up 34% from Thanksgiving
  • iPad traffic was up 36%
  • iPhone traffic up 29%
  • iPad users seeing 8.53 second page response times
  • iPhone users were seeing 8.63 second page response times

Black Friday: 6:00 pm – 12:00 pm

  • traffic remained strong up at nearly the same levels as Black Friday afternoon, but up 96% compared to the same time period on Thanksgiving
  • iPad traffic was up 90%
  • iPhone traffic was up 117% respectively from Thanksgiving.
  • iPad traffic outpaced iPhone 72% to 28%
  • iPad users seeing 8.56 second page response times
  • iPhone users seeing 8.15 second page response times

Mobile & Web Performance:  

    • Average page load time (response time) for mobile web sites across the Top 50 U.S. retailers during Black Friday was 10. 51 seconds. While average availability was 99.75% during this time period.

Top 5 retailers on Black Friday for mobile site performance:

(Rank of Ranks across Response Time, Availability and Consistency)

  1. Blockbuster
  2. Office Depot
  3. Rakuten
  4. JCPenney
  5. HSN
    • Average mobile page load time for Black Friday was slightly above 18 seconds across the Top 50 U.S. retailers when conducting a multi-step transaction.

Top 5 retailers on Black Friday for mobile transaction performance:

(Rank of Ranks across Response Time, Availability and Consistency)

  1. CDW
  2. Grainger
  3. Office Depot
  4. Amazon
  5. Staples
  • Similar to Thanksgiving, for Black Friday U.S. Retail home page response times average 2.5 seconds, while across the Compuware Last Mile Network the average response time remained at almost 10 seconds.

Top 5 retailers on Black Friday for Web Home Page Performance:

(Rank of Ranks across Response Time, Availability and Consistency):

  1. Costco
  2. Apple
  3. Dell
  4. Office Max
  5. JCPenney