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Compuware: Retailers Mobile Performance Missing The Mark For Holiday Shoppers

DETROIT (WWJ) -- Mobile performance of e-commerce websites continues to lag amid a huge surge of mobile shopping, according to Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR), a provider of application performance management software.

Compuware says it analyzed the performance of the mobile shopping websites of top U.S. retailers between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday Dec. 2. The company said three trends were revealed:

* A surge in mobile shopping. A massive increase in mobile device traffic to monitored retail sites started Thanksgiving Day and continued throughout Cyber Monday. Compuware said many retailers were not prepared for the volume of traffic.
* Mobile performance continues to lag. A consumer survey conducted by Harris Interacddtive revealed that 37 percent of smartphone and tablet users will go to a competitor if the response time is more than three seconds. Our data found that page load times during the critical Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday shopping period averaged over 10 seconds, and averaged more than 18 seconds to complete a multiple-step transaction that consists of accessing the home page, conducting a search, viewing a product description, adding items to the shopping cart and reviewing the order. When page load times increase, abandonment rates also increased, causing retailers to lose revenue.
* The more optimized a mobile site is, the better it performs. Compuware APM analyzed how much content retailers were delivering (number of bytes), the complexity of the page (number of objects) and how many third-parties were contributing to the site (number of hosts). The analysis found that too often critical pages were overloaded, made too many roundtrips to the server backend to complete each page, and relied on too many third parties, making them very slow on mobile devices. Highly optimized pages win out when it comes to performance every time.

According to Adobe, following record online sales results for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Cyber Monday saw $2.29 billion in online sales, up 16 percent from 2012 and a record 18.3 percent of sales coming from mobile devices, an increase of 80 percent from 2012.

"This year, mobile site performance had a direct impact on business performance during the start of the holiday shopping season," said John Van Siclen, genereal manager of Compuware's APM business unit. "Simply put, faster sites equal more sales. Retailers fighting for mobile shoppers for the remainder of the season will want to optimize their mobile sites and applications to make the most of increased mobile holiday traffic. Their objective - give mobile visitors the smooth, high performance experience they're looking for."

Visit the Compuware APM Benchmark page for more details on the top three trends as well as for a more in-depth analysis on the performance of retailers' mobile sites during these peak shopping periods.

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