Barnes & Noble’s smartphone friendly site does everything wrong but has managed to get it right.
Even though Barnes & Noble has done virtually everything wrong when it comes to the typically accepted guidelines for ensuring success in mobile commerce, the smartphone friendly site still seems to be bringing in a comfortably high success rate.
The m-commerce website has a heavy page weight, it loads slowly, and it contains far too many page elements.
The mobile commerce site for the number 41 company in the Internet Retailer Mobile 500 essentially breaks all of the rules when it comes to the recommendations that have been made by Keynote, a highly respected firm in this area. And yet, despite its failing to use the best practices for its overall page construction and for its performance, it is doing quite well. According to Keynote’s Matthew Agnoli, “The Barnes & Noble mobile home page is more than twice as slow as any of the other top five sites, as well as more than double the amount of content and is much larger in size.”
Still, the site still ranked as number 5 on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.
This was for the week that ended on July 13. According to Agnoli, the one strong point of the m-commerce site that raised it above many others was that it held to a tremendous success rate, which was 99.35 percent. For that week, the average success rate for all of the sites on the index had been 97.96 percent, so clearly Barnes & Noble’s website performed notably better.
That said, success rate enough may not be adequate for the site to be able to hold its position among the top 5 on the list. If other sites manage to bring their own success rates higher, then Barnes & Noble could find its rank plummeting rather quickly. Agnoli pointed out that “A site needs to be both reliable and fast to ensure high customer satisfaction and to keep customers returning.”
Agnoli recommended that the Barnes & Noble mobile commerce site make a number of changes in order to improve the site’s performance and speed it up, to make it much more appealing to consumers.
The post holiday rush caused nine of the top ten sites on the Keynote index to slow down.
The Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index has revealed that among the top ten sites, nine experienced slower than normal load times during the week that ended on January 5, as a result of heavy use by shoppers who were looking to find a great last minute deal following the official holiday season.
Shoppers continued to search for deals long after the holiday season had already come to a close.
Retailers experienced continued online sales both online and through mobile commerce as shoppers continued to return. This surge following Christmas and New Year placed considerable pressure on websites, particularly those meant for smartphones and tablets. It also added some strain to wireless carrier networks. The result was that page load times slowed down a little bit, according to Keynote’s data from that week.
This shows that online and mobile commerce holiday shopping doesn’t stop at January 1.
Instead this mobile e commerce trend showed that shoppers will continue purchasing as the sales continue in through the first month of the year. This involves a mix of different types of purchases such as through exchanges, buying at discounted sale prices, or shopping with gift cards that were received at Christmastime.
Each of these individual trends adds its own amount of pressure to the overall mobile ecommerce scene. During that week, the average smartphone friendly site homepage load time among the 29 different retailers that make up the index was 7.62 seconds. When compared to the week before, this was slower by 0.62 seconds.
During that week, Sears Holdings Corp. managed to top the index, with a load time of its mcommerce home page load time of 3.13 seconds. Its success rate was a tremendous 100 percent. This earned the company a very strong 986 score out of a possible 1,000 on Keynote’s index.
This was achieved through a light mobile commerce homepage weight of 61 kilobytes made up of only 8 elements. Typically, Keynote’s recommendation is that a site contain only a maximum of 10 to 12 elements (for example, scripts and images) and that it weigh no more than 61 kilobytes to ensure optimal performance.
