Top Retailers Mobile Performance Missing the Mark for Holiday Shoppers

Dec. 6, 2013 - PRLog -- DETROIT--December 5, 2013--Compuware Corporation (http://www.compuware.com/en_us.html) , the technology performance company delivering a new generation of application performance management (APM), today announced the top three mobile performance trends so far this holiday shopping season. This is based on its analysis of the mobile performance of top U.S. retailers between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2013. These trends reveal the critical importance of mobile performance during the holiday shopping season and the impact it can have on the business. For more details on this analysis, click here (http://cpwr.it/rrMrI).

According to Adobe, following record online sales results for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Cyber Monday saw $2.29 billion in online sales, up 16 percent from 2012 and a record 18.3 percent of sales coming from mobile devices, an increase of 80 percent from 2012.

Compuware APM used its Global Monitoring Serviceto measure top retailers performance between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, revealing the following mobile performance trends:

Trend 1: Surge in Mobile Shopping

The massive increase in mobile device traffic to monitored retail sites started on Thanksgiving Day evening and continued throughout Cyber Monday, with volumes 89 percent higher on Black Friday and 87 percent higher on Cyber Monday, compared with days leading up to the online holiday shopping weekend. While some retailers optimized their sites for the growing demand, many were not prepared for the volume of traffic from mobile consumers on smartphones and tablets.

Trend 2:Mobile Performance Continues to Lag Behind

A consumer survey (http://www.compuware.com/en_us/application-performance-ma...) conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that 37 percent of smartphone and tablet users will go to a competitor if the response time is more than three seconds. Our data found that page load  times during the critical Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday shopping period averaged over 10 seconds, and averaged more than 18 seconds to complete a multiple-step transaction that consists of accessing the home page, conducting a search, viewing a product description, adding items to the shopping cart and reviewing the order. When page load times increase, abandonment rates also increased, causing retailers to lose revenue.

Trend 3: The More Optimized the Mobile Site is, the Better it Performs

Compuware APM analyzed how much content retailers were delivering (number of bytes), the complexity of the page (number of objects) and how many third-parties were contributing to the site (number of hosts). The analysis found that too often critical pages were overloaded, made too many roundtrips to the server backend to complete each page, and relied on too many third-parties, making them very slow on mobile devices. Highly optimized pages win out when it comes to performance every time.

“This year, mobile site performance had a direct impact on business performance during the start of the holiday shopping season,” said John Van Siclen, General Manager of Compuware’s APM business unit. “Simply put, faster sites equal more sales. Retailers fighting for mobile shoppers for the remainder of the season will want to optimize their mobile sites and applications to make the most of increased mobile holiday traffic. Their objective - give mobile visitors the smooth, high performance experience they’re looking for.”

Visit the Compuware APM Benchmark page (http://cpwr.it/rrMrI) for more details on the top three trends as well as for a more in-depth analysis on the performance of retailers’ mobile sites during these peak shopping periods.

Compuware APM (http://www.compuware.com/en_us/application-performance-ma...) is the leader in a new generation of application performance management. Unlike traditional APM solutions that are heavy, difficult and reactive, Compuware APM is light, smart and proactive. Compuware APM is built to manage the complexity of today’s most challenging modern applications including mobile, cloud, big data and SOA. Compuware APM optimizes and monitors tens of thousands of applications for more than 5,000 customers, large and small, around the globe. Through the lens of end-user experience, our customers enjoy faster performance, proactive problem resolution, accelerated time-to-market and reduced application management costs through smarter analytics, advanced APM automation and a unique performance lifecycle foundation.