There are high hopes among retailers for the mobile channel this holiday season. A new report by eMarketer forecasts a 50% increase in penetration for 2011. It also cites a PayPal survey of smartphone and tablet owners that believe holiday m-commerce could nearly crack the half-way mark this season.
Google projects that greater than 33% of both smartphone and tablet shoppers plan to start their holiday shopping this year before Thanksgiving. The search provider also says many advertisers do not realize that mobile users actively search for last minute holiday gifts and to locate stores to purchase these last minute gifts. It believes that 44% of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates.
Despite such data, it is unclear whether retailers are taking into account the fact that mobile consumers are an impatient bunch, unwilling to wait more than a handful — at most five — seconds for a page to load. Few mobile pages meet this standard right now.
Vendors and marketers are addressing this issue in a number of ways. There is the Amazon Kindle Fire, whose seamless integration with its e-tailers, as well as new mobile browser technology, Silk, is expected to save precious seconds off a transaction. There also continues to be a steady release of new tools to optimize mobile websites.
Kindle Fire's Mobile Web Performance
One of the ways Amazon expects to crack the iPad’s dominance in the tablet market is via its mobile browser, Internet Retailer writes. Amazon says it is able to deliver on faster speed page loads via a fleet of web servers in its Elastic Compute Cloud. "Amazon’s Silk browser is an interesting concept," Amir Rozenberg, product manager, mobile, at performance management company Compuware Gomez, told Internet Retailer. "Not only does it run on a device which currently only functions on Wi-Fi—so already pretty fast when compared to 3G—but it leverages the power of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to handle a lot of the processing required to render and deliver web pages to the end user's tablet."
New Tools
New tools are also continually being introduced. Strangeloop recently introduced such a product, Mobile Site Optimizer. Mobile Site Optimizer is currently in beta and will be available in Q4 of this year. It uses features in HTML5 and Google's SPDY protocol to address the challenges of mobile environments, it says, making pages up to 60% faster.
But Is It Enough?
This combo approach to mobile page load needs to make up for lost ground with consumers, and quickly. Global consumers' expectations for mobile and application performance are not being met, a survey from Compuware found. Nearly 60% of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74% are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.
Only 50% are willing to wait five seconds or less for an application to load before exiting. In addition, mobile users do not have much patience for retrying a website or application that is not functioning initially — a third will go to a competitor's site instead. The majority of mobile web users are only willing to retry a website (78%) or application (80%) two times or less if it does not work initially.
Auto Mobile Sites Particularly Bad
The situation is worse for mobile automotive sites, Compuware found as it launched its U.S. Automotive Mobile Site Performance Index. All 23 mobile-optimized versions of leading automotive manufacturers' sites provided poor mobile performance with page load time speeds ranging from 6.0 to 18.7 seconds in August, it said. Not good, Compuware said, when one considers that approximately 17% of the U.S. mobile audience are "auto intenders" — people who will buy a new car over the next six months.
