By Robert Castley

Results for September show that the UK sites monitored – Next, Tesco, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis – improved overall in terms of their mobile performance, however some sites continued to struggle with availability. Tesco’s mobile site came in last place of all the sites monitored, with a poor average success rate of only 93.55% for the month.

Keynote Systems has monitored the performance of top retail sites from Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and USA throughout September, results below.

Rank Country Site Average load time (seconds) September ranking

The German retailers outperformed all of the other sites monitored in the response time category with OTTO, Aldi and Amazon (DE) securing three of the top four spots. OTTO was the quickest site to load with an average response time of 4.49 seconds. However, all three of the German sites were in the bottom half of the index for availability. The top three sites for availability – Amazon (JP), H&M (SE) and IKEA (SE) – all managed to score a 100% success rate for September; however they did not perform so well in the speed category.

Very few sites had consistently good performances across both indices, with only Next (UK), Chanel (FR), Marks & Spencer (UK), Walmart (US), Amazon (JP) and John Lewis (UK) appearing in the top half for both response times and availability.

Carrefour was the poorest performing mobile site overall for September with an average availability of 99.29% and a very slow response time of 56.06 seconds.

As the end of the year draws ever closer, now is really the time that consumers start thinking about Christmas shopping, and retailers should too. This year more than ever before, we’re going to see a huge number of consumers conducting their Christmas shopping on their mobiles – whether it’s for research, browsing, comparing prices or actually making purchases. However, if consumers have to wait for more than ten seconds for a mobile site home page to load, it’s unlikely they’ll have enough faith in the retailer to complete a transaction from their mobile phone.

Retailers still have time to assess their mobile site, and work towards optimising the end-user experience before the Christmas rush begins,” continued Castley. “It’s no longer acceptable for retailers to expect mobile shoppers to navigate around a Web site that is not configured for their mobile device. Content providers need to focus on the real end-user experience so that they can configure their retail sites to ensure the most positive mobile shopping offering for their customers.

The mobile sites of these retailers were measured using a webkit based smart phone browser every hour from London, Nürnberg, Paris, San Francisco, New York, Stockholm, Sydney and Tokyo.

About the author

Robert Castley, lead solutions consultant at Keynote Systemsfor Keynote System.

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