Not Ready for Prime Time

Shopping a mobile website can be fun, but if you’re a type-A, get-it-done-now kind of shopper, it may not be the best retail channel for you.

Keynote Competitive Research, the analytic arm of San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote Systems, has released top-line results of its first-ever comprehensive study on the speed and reliability of leading retail mobile websites. Despite some noteworthy findings, researchers deemed the results unimpressive.

Keynote measured the performance of 10 retailers’ mobile websites, including Amazon, Best Buy, Musician’s Friend, Sears and Wal-Mart during the critical weeks from Nov. 18, 2009, to Jan. 4, 2010. The study measured the download performance for three pages on each site: loading the mobile site home page, searching for product and getting information about a specific product.

The New York and San Francisco markets were researched for the study, using AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon wireless data connections.

“Shopping on mobile websites still has a lot of catching up to do in both download performance and uptime, when compared to the performance of connected websites,” says Ben Rushlo, senior manager of Internet technologies at Keynote.

Home page average load times ranged from Best Buy’s 8.3 seconds to another retailer’s dismal 34.4 seconds. The fastest search result came from Wal-Mart clocking in at 4.5 seconds, beating the slowest by more than 30 seconds. Foot Locker (5.7 seconds) turned in the best time when it came to delivering product information.

“Consumers on the wired web are used to much, much faster times, and often expect pages to load in two seconds or less,” Rushlo says. “Even the best mobile websites take two to three times as long as that despite being optimized heavily for the mobile phone experience.”

The Keynote study also showed that mobile websites have much higher error rates than their wired-web counterparts.