The onslaught of shoppers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday provides an annual test of retailers’ ability to cope with the surge of traffic to their Web and mobile
properties. With traffic to retail sites on Black Friday up 35% this year, and e-commerce sales up 26%, that test was even more severe than usual.
Retailers’ PC-based sites were
straining under the weight of the increased activity. The consumer satisfaction rating for the top 50 U.S. retailers’ sites dropped 10% from Black Friday through Sunday morning, compared to the
October baseline period, according to data from Web performance-tracking service Compuware Gomez.
The research also showed 43 of the top 50 retailers had lower performance scores than in
October. “Operators of these Web sites are clearly struggling to meet basic user performance expectations,” stated the Gomez report.
The firm’s performance index calculates
scores from 0 to 100, based on how long it takes a retailers’ home pages to load. A page load time of two seconds or less would have a rating of “satisfied”; a response time of two
to eight seconds would be “tolerated." Any longer than eight seconds would get “frustrated.”
A score of 0 would indicate all tests fell into the frustrated category, while
100 would mean all tests met the standard for a satisfied rating. The average index score of 40.2 among the top 50 retailers in October fell to 36.7 on Black Friday.
Prior research by
Forrester has shown that 40% of online shoppers will abandon a site after waiting three seconds for a page to load. Separate findings by Gomez indicate that conversion rates increase 74% when load
times decrease from eight seconds to two seconds.
The top-ranking e-commerce sites from Black Friday through Sunday morning were JC Penney, Apple and Dell. Page load time spiked 19% for the
top 50 retailers (as determined by trade publication Internet Retailer). But within that group, the top 10 sites improved by about 1%, raising the overall average.
On the mobile side, retailer
sites fared better than might be expected.
Mobile e-commerce sites on smartphones actually saw performance satisfaction increase on Black Friday, despite the proportion of mobile shoppers
tripling to 11% this year. Only one of the top 10 retailers’ mobile sites showed a dip in performance from October, while Sears, Amazon and Best Buy had the top-rated mobile sites.
To
help speed up page load times during the holiday shopping season, six of the top 10 retailers reduced the amount of data on the their mobile home pages, per the Gomez report.
The firm’s
performance data is drawn from its tracking of 150 high-bandwidth backbone locations and 150,000 desktop computers, as well as its managed practice of over 20 million monthly measurements. Gomez will
release site performance results for Cyber Monday on Tuesday. Early results reported Monday afternoon by Coremetrics indicated that sales were up 15% from a year ago.