Tag: mobile ecommerce

Mobile commerce website load time temporarily slowed

| January 24, 2014

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.

Mobile Commerce - Slow WebsiteInstead 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.

Mobile payments bring together the top U.K. operators

| January 23, 2014

The largest mobile companies in the United Kingdom are coming together to boost m-commerce.

The leading mobile operators in the United Kingdom are coming together once more in a joint effort to create a new approach to an industry wide jumpstart to the mobile payments market that has been struggling in the country.

There is already a surprising amount of competition in this market which has yet to prove itself.

The three major players in this mobile payments effort are Everything Everywhere (the joint venture between T-Mobile and Orange), as well as Telefonica UK (also recognized as O2), and Vodafone UK (also known simply as Vodafone). These three companies have announced that they will be working together for both transactions and for mobile marketing.

There is a rival competitor that is notably absent in this mobile payments partnership.

UK Mobile Payments - M-Commerce BoostAs this mobile commerce platform comes together, it is notable that the operator, 3, is absent in the mix. This is interesting because it will clearly be a factor being considered when competition authorities have their look.

That said, ahead of that time – if it does indeed occur – the players in this partnership will need to come up with a way of accomplishing what they are calling a “groundbreaking venture”, which has promised “to accelerate the development of innovative mobile services for consumers and business customers.”

This does have the potential of adding something different to the transactions and mobile ecommerce space, as it would provide one standard ecosystem that would assist retailers, marketers, and banks, alike, in communicating with consumers. This is a very strong trend, at the moment, and assembling it into a single standard ecosystem is becoming an extremely fashionable goal.

What will also be interesting to watch throughout the development of this partnership is the role that NFC technology will play. It has previously struggled in the U.K., and was abandoned outright by O2 only last week. Also undisclosed, at this point, will be the size of the investment contribution that will be made by each of the companies in order to be able to move this mobile payments startup forward.