Keynote Competitive Research, the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, announced that it has more than doubled the size of the world's first-ever weekly smartphone mobile commerce index with the addition of 16 new mobile sites. The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index, launched in September 2010, ranks leading and up-and-coming US retail mobile Web sites based on download speed and reliability. Mobile sites added to the index include CVS, Staples, Brookstone, Lowe's, Office Depot, The Home Depot, Toys 'R' Us, Macy's, Buy.com, 1-800-Flowers.com, Drugstore. com, Costco, J.C. Penney, HSN, ShopNBC, and Overtock.com. These sites join the index's inaugural sites of Walgreens, Your Electronic Warehouse, Amazon, Dell, Walmart, Victoria's Secret, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Sun-glass Hut, Foot Locker, K&L Wine Merchants, Target, and Toolfetch.com.
Internet Retailer, a leading e-retailing magazine, features the weekly index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. The index shows the average response times and success rates for downloading the homepage of selected mobile commerce sites on popular smartphones using Keynote's commercially available mobile performance monitoring service, Mobile Web Perspective.
"With the expansion of Keynote's Mobile Commerce Performance Index to 30 sites including retailers from multiple sectors, the index has become an extremely valuable tool for retailers that need to understand the latest mobile Web performance trends and benchmark themselves against other retailers who have a mobile Web presence," said Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote. "As smartphone use has exploded in popularity the need for well designed mobile retail Web sites has grown exponentially. In fact, these days the first experience a customer may have with a retailer may very likely be the retailer's mobile Web site before they access the same site from a desktop or physically walk into a 'brick and mortar' store."
Ng continued, "Out of the 30 retailers in the index, 28 of them are optimized for all four mobile devices used in the index. One retailer didn't optimize for the Motorola Droid X and another one didn't optimize for the BlackBerry Curve 8900. Still, all the retailers have a mobile site and one-third of the 30 sites further optimized their mobile page for feature phone device access. This shows that regardless of a retailer's size--from Walmart.com to Your Electronic Warehouse--or retail sector--from books to office supplies to Shoes--retailers acknowledge the growing importance of mobile users to their business and increasingly are building mobile-optimized sites."
The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index is designed to collect data representing a wide range of mobile users. Data is collected for each site emulating four different mobile devices over four wireless carrier networks at four US cities. The overall load time (seconds) and success rate (percent) are the aggregated results of each site. Retailers on the index, and any other retailer, can easily benchmark them-selves against competitors and make improvements to stay ahead of the pack, or compare their overall performance to the index average and ensure they are staying close to the industry average. Over time, the weekly data also provides trending data that a retailer can use to determine if its mobile site performance is consistently positive or negative. Even small, unexpected performance changes can provide an early warning sign of potentially larger issues brewing. Additionally, significant performance changes can be correlated with recent events such as software releases, hardware upgrades or changes in traffic volume.
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 Sears Holdings Corp. and Foot Locker Inc., to midsized retailers like Sunglass Hut and K&L Wine Merchants. Keynote repeatedly tests each site in the index using the retailer's main URL hourly and around the clock (24/7) during the monitoring period emulating four different mobile devices (including both smartphones and feature phones) on four different wireless carrier networks: Apple Inc.'s iPhone 4 on AT&T, the HTC EVO on Sprint, the Motorola Droid X (which uses Google Inc.'s Android operating system) on Verizon Wireless, and the Black-Berry Curve 8900 on the T-Mobile network from four US locations (New York, Dallas, Chicago, and San Francisco - Bay Area).
To learn more about performance indices and industry studies published by Keynote Competitive Research, please visit http://www.keynote.com/keynote_competitive_research.
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