Tag: holiday mobile commerce

Retailers are giving one final post-Christmas sales push to get the most out of the shopping season.

Each of the five highest ranked retailers in the Keynote Mobile Commerce Index have implemented strategies that have been designed to be able to reduce the length of time that it takes their m-sites to load.

Keynote says that these stores are working to make sure their sites load faster and more accurately.

This was the same number of retailers that were using their standard web shopping sites for this post Christmas holiday shopping season and that were working to make sure that their sites loaded well. Out of the five top mobile commerce retailers as ranked by Keynote Systems, four experienced only a small variation in the speed and size of their pages last week when compared to the week before. This, according to a mobile performance evangelist from Keynote, Abelardo Gonzalez. Moreover, the leading five retailers in last week’s index were all the top five in the week before, as well.

The retailers used proper mobile commerce page design practices to improve the experience.

Gonzalez explained that “The retailers took advantage of mobile page design web practices—such as minimizing the number of objects and page size—to deliver a consistent and reliable experience.” The only exception that he identified was in JCP.com, from J.C. Penney Co. Inc., which saw a slower load time and a larger page size and object count than it had the week before. Despite the fact that it had a slower load time, however, Keynote did point out that the site was able to load 100 percent of the time.

J.C. Penney accomplished this goal through the use of a content delivery network. This firm, Akamai, was used to make certain that each of the elements of the page would render properly throughout the site. The reliability rating that this achieved for the site helped the company to keep its position among the top five retailers on the mobile commerce index. J.C. Penney’s position was second on the list, with a 100 percent success rate and a load time of 5.42 seconds, for a score of 935.

The holiday shopping season has allowed the channel to become a standard form of comparison and purchasing.

The rapidly growing m-commerce trends of browsing, comparing, and actually buying on smartphones and tablets aren’t just a little piece of the fringe, anymore, but are starting to officially become mainstream.

Holiday shoppers, this year, have shown that even when they don’t make purchases, they use their devices.

Many analysts have been looking directly toward the purchasing data to determine whether or not m-commerce trends have been pointing toward the mainstream. However, when that data is considered, while there has been massive year over year growth, it still represents only a sliver of the total online purchases and even less of the buying as a whole. When the definition of mobile shopping is broadened, it soon becomes clear that purchasing is only one of several behaviors for which shoppers use their smartphones and tablets.

These m-commerce trends are important to recognize as they are often deciding factors for online and in store purchases.

That said, even without taking the browsing, price comparisons, receipt of advertising and discount coupons, and other activities into account, there has still been a great deal of growth, so far, over the holiday shopping season when it comes to mobile commerce purchases. But it seems to be in those “process” activities on the way to actually buying that small screens truly shine. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that almost 40 percent of all of the online traffic on Black Friday and almost a third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday was from smartphones and tablets.

Even though this did not represent the purchases being made, it shows that people are using their smartphones and tablets to visit websites and to look at companies, products, and prices. Because the devices are always with their owners, they are automatically using them, first, to perform quick searches, to locate nearby businesses, to find out whether or not the item that they want is in stock, and to discover the best possible price.

Three years ago, only 4 percent of Cyber Monday’s online traffic came from mobile. This makes it clear that m-commerce trends are headed toward – if they have not already achieved – mainstream status.