Europe storms ahead in Keynote mobile retail study

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Europe storms ahead in Keynote mobile retail study.

July saw the performance of European mobile sites soar, taking the top six places for load time in the Keynote Mobile Retail Index World Edition.  The top six websites which were from Germany, UK and France took an average of just under six seconds to load and, by comparison, the top six non-European sites took 10.1 seconds, more than four seconds slower.
 
Keynote Competitive Research, the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, tracks the mobile site performance of 24 of the top retailers across seven countries.  Overall, websites performed better in July, when compared with June.  In June, the average load time was 20 seconds, which fell to 15.68 seconds in July.  The average availability of the mobile retail sites monitored was also better during July, increasing from a 96.64 percent success rate to 98.04 percent.

 
The scoreboard for mobile website availability changed considerably between June and July, with Walmart which was at the top of the table with 100 percent availability in June falling to nineteenth, as Amazon in Japan took the top spot with 100 percent availability.  Other highlights include Fnac in France rising from twelfth place to fourth, and Aldi in Germany rising from seventh to second place for availability.  For load speed, German site OTTO took the top spot, with an average load time of 4.39 seconds.
 
The full table of mobile retails sites that Keynote Systems monitors from Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and the USA is below:

"Europe is doing exceptionally well in the mobile website performance tables and is clearly valuing the importance of those first few seconds users arrive onto a website," said Robert Castley, lead solutions consultant at Keynote systems.  "Achieving customer loyalty through a consistently well performing website is crucial in the current highly competitive marketplace, and especially when you consider how easy it is to switch from one website to another on a mobile device."
 
"Retailers need to understand that how their mobile website performs is equivalent to how staff treat customers in a traditional shop.  User experience can make or break a reputation and customers need to be talking about your mobile website for the right reasons, this is something that the non-European companies in the table need to remember."
 
The mobile sites of these retailers were measured using a webkit based smartphone browser every hour from London, Nrnberg, Paris, San Francisco, New York, Stockholm, Sydney and Tokyo.