It doesn’t take much to improve m-commerce site performance. Case in point, Buy.com Inc.
Last week, the e-retailer tossed a jQuery JavaScript element from its m-commerce site home page and in the process decreased the time it took to download the home page from 10.70 seconds for the week ending Sept. 25 to 8.62 seconds for the week ending Oct. 2, according to the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index. This shot the merchant up from No. 19 on the index the previous week to No. 11.
“Like other companies improving their rank over the last few weeks, Buy.com has reduced their page size, and benefited from it,” says Joe Flake, mobile performance expert at mobile and web performance management firm Keynote Systems Inc. “In this case, Buy.com eliminated a jQuery JavaScript element, a popular script library for web pages. But that one element was large. Their page size dropped from about 80 kilobytes to about 50 kilobytes with this one change.”
Buy.com did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Sears Holdings Corp. topped the index this week, its m-commerce site home page loading on average in 3.55 seconds, doing so successfully 99.07% of the time, for an index score of 1,000 out of 1,000. Dell Inc. came in second with a load time of 5.54 seconds and a success rate of 98.83% for a score of 979. Walgreen Co. came in third with a load time of 6.45 seconds and a success rate of 99.07% for a score of 973.
The index average load time was 10.34 seconds, the average success rate was 96.09% and the average score was 904.
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 Sunday 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. It runs the tests in Chicago, Dallas, New York and San Francisco.
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.