A Merry Mobile Shopping Season

Over the years there's been a common misconception around the idea that users are willing to wait longer for mobile sites. Studies have shown that's simply not the case. Mobile commerce sites loaded in an average of 8.63 seconds the week prior to Cyber Monday this year, and additional traffic ballooned that number to 9.75 seconds the week of Cyber Monday, according to the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index. The problem is that the majority of mobile users expect mobile sites to load significantly faster than either of those averages. In fact, a recent Radware study reports that only 2 percent of pages in the Retail Top 100 load in under four seconds, despite the fact that the majority of users expect mobile sites to load in less than 4 seconds. For online retailers to truly capitalize on the growing potential mobile shoppers represent, they need to recognize that mobile performance will quickly become one of the greatest competitive differentiators.