US retailers' mobile performance embarrassingly slow: Yottaa report

Retailers in the US have beautiful, intuitive and shoppable mobile experiences, however, most retailers’ mobile performance is nothing short of embarrassingly slow, according to a recent report. Retailers’ growing desire to build more functionality into their shopping experience with the help of third parties, is also causing slow page loads, as per the report.

Yottaa, a cloud platform for accelerating e-commerce, has published a new research report titled, ‘2018 E-commerce Website Performance: The Stakes Are Increasing, But Are Retailers Falling Behind?’ The research, which was conducted by Retail Systems Research (RSR), evaluates 80 major retail websites on page speed performance as well as shopper experience.

The average number of third party requests for the retailers in the report was 139, representing a 50 per cent growth over last year. In terms of actual third party technologies implemented, most of the sites tested had between 30-40, with Chicos leading the pack with 47 third parties on its site, says the report.

Retailers did not do well in this evaluation as the highest score this year was only a 63 per cent, down from a D+ last year. These scores mean the needle is moving in the exact wrong direction and is the direct result of retailers adding third party functionality (a good thing) to their sites, but without testing for the effect those features have on performance.

“All the features and functions in the world won’t matter if the shopper can’t access a site at a rate commensurate to his/her fast-paced lifestyle,” added the report.

“This year’s RSR report on e-commerce website performance highlights both the importance of third party technologies and the impact they have on site performance,” said Rich Stendardo, CEO of Yottaa.

“These technologies, such as personalisation and live chat, provide great online experiences for shoppers. However, as retailers add more and more third parties, they also risk slowing down page load speeds, which causes shoppers to leave a site resulting in lost online revenue. This report demonstrates that retailers need to find a way to create both engaging and fast online experiences.”

RSR, an industry market intelligence firm that helps retailers make more strategic decisions about the role of information technology in their enterprise, conducted the study from April to May of 2018.

In keeping with the methodology used in last year’s report, RSR assembled a list of 80 top retail sites, and then tested the speed at which each retailers’ desktop and mobile sites loaded, evaluated the ease with which a shopper could find a product, and noted what ancillary tools (product reviews, recommendations, personalisation and chat features) were provided to make the shopping journey more satisfying. The retailers were then ranked from 1 to 80 based on the collected data.