Online luxury marketplace Portero deploys Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages to speed up its mobile landing pages from smartphone search results.

Marketplace Portero is using Google Inc.’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to make the pages consumers land on when visiting its site from smartphone search results load faster.

The decision was a no-brainer, says Alexis Clarbour, director at the pre-owned luxury goods marketplace. Half of Portero’s web traffic stems from smartphones, and 99% of mobile traffic comes from search results, which are mostly from Google, according to web measurement firm SimilarWeb Ltd.

AMP allows businesses, including retailers, to build lightweight mobile pages that load as fast as possible on smartphones. The pages load super fast because the HTML code contains restrictions, such as not allowing custom Javascript coding. AMP also uses AMP Cache, which is Google’s content delivery network that validates that every page works and doesn’t depend on external resources, such as suggested products powered by an e-commerce technology vendor. Instead, coders have to build in these features using Google-approved specifications. A content delivery network is a network of servers that delivers web content to consumers based on their location, the origin of the webpage and the location of the server.

Here’s how AMP works for Portero: A consumer searches “Hermes bag” on Google.com on her smartphone and will see this handbag sold by Portero listed in search results. The listing will have a small lightning bolt icon next to it with the words “AMP,” which is how Google signifies to users that the page will load super fast on a smartphone. When a consumer taps on the link, the AMP page with the Hermes bag loads in less than a second. On the page, the shopper can see all the content she normally would on the mobile site’s version of that page, such as product images, the product details, shipping information and other Portero products. If she taps on any of the links on the AMP page, she is then redirected to the mobile site.

“The only difference (in the AMP page) is how fast it is—how really fast it is,” Clarbour says.

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And speed matters on mobile. Portero’s mobile AMP pages load on average in 1.2 seconds compared with 8 seconds before it switched, she says. In the past four months since the marketplace implemented AMP, Portero’s mobile conversion rate tripled, she says.

“When people search on Google and are looking for specific pages or items, those pages (that are) AMP-ed are coming up first,” Clarbour says. “It’s a better user experience. It’s one or two less clicks to find the product that they are really looking for.”

“It’s why everyone is investing in mobile. It’s about getting people to the checkout page or product page as fast as possible,” she adds. In fact, Portero is no longer considering developing an app, since the AMP pages are boosting its mobile conversion rate, she says.

Portero’s overall conversion rate is around 1%, which is lower than the 3.3% average of the Top 500 Retailers in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Guide, according to Top500Guide.com. However, because Portero sells luxury goods, its average order value is more than $2,000, which is much higher than the Top 500 average of $217.

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Another payoff of deploying AMP is that Portero’s mobile site bounce rate, or rate at which consumer leaves the website after only vising one page, has decreased by 29% to 47.9% from 67.1%.

Portero uses mobile technology vendor WompMobile Inc. for its mobile website, and the vendor approached the marketplace about building AMP pages, Clarbour says. Trying out AMP was not a hard decision for Clarbour considering Google is investing in the technology and the importance of mobile search traffic for Portero, she says.

It took two to three weeks to develop and deploy the AMP pages, and Portero only had to add a line of code to its site, Clabour says.

To develop the AMP pages, WompMobile charges less than $10,000 and retailers pay a monthly fee that is less than $500, says Madison Miner, co-founder and CEO at WompMobile.

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Google frequently changes the rules on what types of code will qualify for the “AMP” verification, which is why the vendor charges the monthly fee, he says.

Clabour receives an email alert from Google each time the search engine finds an error on an AMP page. She then sends this message to WompMobile so that it can fix the error and keep the AMP valid with Google. This has happened a few times since Portero deployed AMP in December, she says.

WompMobile has developed AMP pages for 34 e-commerce clients. On average, WompMobile’s clients that deploy AMP increase their mobile conversion rates 105%, decrease bounce rates by 31% and increase click-through rates from search engines by 29%, the vendor says.


In an ongoing effort to understand the most vital business strategies of merchants that sell online, Internet Retailer is taking a deep dive on conversion rate. Help us improve our estimates and category benchmarks by answering the two questions below. 


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