However, the same ranking system showed that Sears is struggling where the bookstore excelled.
Among all of the 30 retailers that are ranked on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index, it was Barnes & Noble that led the rest, during the week that ended on February 10.
The website of the retailer had an average load time that was a super fast 4.80 seconds.
Furthermore, the smartphone friendly website was not only able to load quickly, but it did so successfully 99.78 percent of the time. This, according to the statistics collected by Keynote throughout that week. By balancing the average load time with its successful completion rate, the retailer was awarded a score of 959 out of a possible 1,000 points.
This was a considerably better mobile commerce performance than the next site on the Index.
Amazon’s smartphone optimized site came in second on the mobile commerce scale. Its average load time was 6.8 seconds, which was significantly slower than Barnes & Noble. That said, it boasted an identical success rate at 99.78 percent. This scored the online marketplace at 925 points.
The third place mobile commerce site was Toolfetch.com. Its average load time was a tremendously fast 2.82 seconds, and its homepage successfully loaded 99.36 percent of the time. This earned the website a score of 921. W.W. Grainger was in fourth place after loading in 3.85 seconds and doing so successfully 99.46 percent of the time with a 918 point score. The last out of the top five sites was Best Buy, which had a 6.60 second load time and a 99.56 percent success rate for a score of 882.
According to a Keynote mobile commerce website performance expert, Abelardo Gonzalez, one of the things that all of the leading sites on the index have in common is that their optimized homepages are no greater than 300 kilobytes. This allows them to keep the impact of unpredictable wireless networks on their page loads to a minimum.
Keynote also pointed out that the mobile commerce site performance at Sears showed the opposite in performance. After having made a tremendous change to the site, the end result was that the home page was larger in size and therefore performed more poorly.
