Tag: mobile commerce performance

The company’s online transformation is now a year old and is proving to have been highly worthwhile.

Argos has announced that in the first half of its financial year, its mobile commerce has over doubled and is now representing 16 percent of its total online sales, only one year after having redesigned its entire digital existence.

Approximately 43 percent of all of its sales were made online, illustrating the growing importance of digital.

This figure includes the Check & Reserve service use, which experienced a 124 percent mobile commerce growth over smartphones and tablets, combined. This was led by a new app that was released for both of those devices. Overall, in the multichannel sales experienced by the company are now representing 52 percent of the total sales at Argos. During that period, it represented £899 million in sales.

At the same time, Homebase, an Argos sister company has also seen extensive mobile commerce growth.

Within the half year period, Homebase saw a growth in its own multichannel sales by 28 percent. Both of those companies are owned by Home Retail Group. Overall, that organization saw a rise in sales of 3 percent, reaching £2.6 billion within the 26 weeks that ended on August 31. This includes the figure contributed by mobile commerce.

At Argos, like-for-like sales increased by 2.3 percent, whereas at Homebase, those sales increased by 5.9 percent. That said, at the same time, there was a 70 decrease in pre-tax profits, which dropped to £14.2 million from having been £46.7 million during the same period in 2012. This is explained because last year the organization was able to benefit from a very large credit of £35 million. This year, it faced a cost of £12.6 million instead of a credit. This had to do with the expenses of its “restructuring actions” such as its digital transformation program.

At the same time, if all of those offline, online, and mobile commerce costs are not taken into account, then the benchmark pre-tax profits brought in £27.4 million, which is an increase of 53 percent over the £17.9 million that was seen last year.

Though load time has improved, Keynote Systems points out the need for better successful loading.

Keynote Systems has released its most recent Mobile Commerce Index report, which has revealed that the Victoria’s Secret Direct homepage was only capable of loading successfully at a rate of 97.79 percent.

This has been holding the company back on the index despite its rapid load time.

Last week, the mobile commerce index granted Victoria’s Secret its last possible position out of 30 due to its poor performance. However, this most recent week, which ended on January 20, it rose by nine places to reach the 21 spot. This improvement was almost entirely because of the improvements that were made to the load time on its homepage. Though the percentage of time that the page was able to completely load successfully, it is still far below the average on the index.

Keynote believes that site could still make a number of considerable mobile commerce performance improvements.

In this, Keynote Systems stated that the retailer should focus its attention on improving the mobile commerce site’s ability to successfully load. It did, however, acknowledge the better results when compared to the week before.

The week that ended on January 13 showed that the load time for the Victoria’s Secret homepage was 7.64 seconds. Its success rate was 97.45 percent. When that data was combined into the mobile commerce index at Keynote, it generated a low 391 point score out of 1,000 possible points.

However, during the week ending on January 20, the load time improved to 7.36 seconds, and the successful load rate etched up slightly to 97.79 percent. The result from that data mix on the index gave Victoria’s Secret a mobile commerce score of 719, which was a vast improvement.

Equally, though, while the load time – which is considerably better than the index average of 9.19 seconds – was very positive, it was the percentage of successful loads that held the site back from a significantly higher potential score. Keynote considers 99 percent or better to be the optimal range. The most recent index average was 98.77 percent. This placed Victoria’s Secret’s website far below the mark that should be its mobile commerce site target.