Companies have been putting tremendous effort into improving the performance of their Web and mobile channels to ensure a successful end user experience. This past holiday season, it was put to test as sales on mobile devices were the highest they’ve ever been, accounting for 55 percent of e-commerce traffic on Black Friday and 412 percent on Cyber Monday.
Keynote recently monitored and measured the experience of 16 native iOS and Android apps from eight top retailers. Not surprisingly, the study reported that 8 out of every 10 apps experienced a failure in the 2 week period.
The benchmark studied the shopping experience and the length of interaction across six stages from launching an app, searching for an item, getting the product details, adding to the wish list, checking the product review and finding the store location to correlate its impact on company revenues and customer engagement.
Key Findings of the Study
■ 80 percent of mobile native apps experienced a performance failure
■ The study found an average of 98.2 percent uptime. For a company with $1 billion annual mobile sales, this can result in revenue leakage of $1.4 million per month
■ The average time it took to carry out all six transactions was 18.7 seconds
■ Top tier apps based on engagement outperformed bottom ones by 33 percent
■ iOS apps performed 40 percent faster than the Android apps, which corresponds to an 18.5 percent higher average order of iOS customers than Android users
These findings underscore that the expectations of speed, reliability and quality are becoming increasingly difficult to deliver in the digital experience, and mobile is the latest but also the least understood area. The development and deployment frameworks, architectures and KPIs used to deliver Web experiences translate poorly to native mobile apps. And yet, for those companies that get mobile application delivery and performance right, the upside is great.
As the next generation of consumers increasingly depends on their smartphones and tablets to interact with your brand, now is the time to understand mobile performance and quality. Delivery without analysis is no longer acceptable. Specifically in retail, with the growth of mobile technology, today's retailers and brand owners are challenged to think about the new overall consumer experience.
Aaron Rudger is Director of Product Marketing at Keynote.
