Home goods and electronics retailer Brookstone Inc. soared 20 positions to No. 4 on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index, based in large part on improvement in the percentage of the time its m-commerce site home page successfully loaded last week, moving up 3.76 percentage points to 99.12%. The m-commerce site of Brookstone, No. 189 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, loaded on average in 6.43 seconds. It earned an index score of 924 out of 1,000.
The average load time for the 30 retailers on the index was 9.13 seconds and the average success rate was 98.43% for a score of 740, reports mobile and web performance management firm Keynote Systems Inc.
The improvement in Brookstone’s success rate stemmed from a site outage the previous week; the site suffered no outages last week, significantly improving its score. The outage occurred between 10:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m. June 21-22.
“Based on the hours of the interruption, one might suspect a scheduled maintenance, but the site returned a ‘Page not found 404 error’ and there was no ‘Site maintenance’ message,” says Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote Systems. “If conducting maintenance, retailers should always provide a ‘Site under maintenance’ message to inform end users when to expect service to resume. After Brookstone recovered from the interruption, the site performed relatively well and stable over the last week.”
Brookstone did not respond to a request for comment.
Lowe’s Cos. Inc. topped the index last week with a load time of 6.19 seconds and a success rate of 99.43% for a score of 961. Walgreen Co. came in second with a load time of 5.92 seconds and a success rate of 99.24% for a score of 958. And Amazon.com Inc. came in third with a load time of 6.17 seconds and a success rate of 99.16% for a score of 940.
Click here and then click on Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index Part 1 and Part 2 to see this week’s complete results for all 30 retailers on the index.
Keynote Systems measures 30 representative m-commerce sites exclusively for Internet Retailer. The sites include merchants in various categories and channels, and of various sizes, ranging from such giants as Amazon.com Inc., Sears Holdings Corp. and 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., to midsized retailers like Sunglass Hut, Toolfetch.com LLC and Your Electronic Warehouse. Keynote tests the sites in the index every hour Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. through midnight Eastern time, emulating four different smartphones on four different wireless networks: Apple Inc.’s iPhone 4 on AT&T, the HTC Evo on Sprint, the BlackBerry Curve on T-Mobile and the Droid X on Verizon. The HTC Evo and the Droid X run Google Inc.’s Android operating system.
Keynote combines a site’s load time and success rate, equally weighted, into a single score. Given both performance and availability are important, the score reflects the overall quality of the home page; a higher score indicates better performance. Scores also reflect how close sites are to each other in overall quality. The index average score is the midpoint among all the sites’ scores.