Top 100 Internet Retailers Lose Over $600MM in Annual E-Commerce Sales Due to Slow Mobile Websites

Data released today from adaptive website platform provider, Mobify, reveals hundreds of millions of lost e-commerce sales from the world's largest e-retailers due to slow load times for mobile websites.

VANCOUVER, June 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ - Mobile technology company, Mobify, released new data today that reveals the financial impact of slow loading mobile websites for the world's Top 100 Internet Retailers. The release of these findings corresponds with the launch of Mobify Performance Suite, a series of performance-optimizing features designed to improve the performance of mobile and responsive websites through decreased download time and content compression.

Slow websites are a deterrent for customers using mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. With the growing number of retailers launching rich responsive websites, mobile loading times continue to climb. Research from KISSmetrics shows that mobile users stay longer and engage more with fast-loading websites, with a one second delay in download time resulting in a 7% reduction in conversions.

To find out how much revenue in e-commerce sales are being lost each year due to poor website performance, Mobify independently measured the mobile download times of 2012's Top 100 Internet Retailer websites. The mobile download times were combined with mobile visits, mobile revenue and conversion rates from the Internet Retailer's Top 500 Guide. Using this dataset, Mobify applied the KISSMetrics 7% conversion reduction model to each of the top 100 website homepages. The results revealed a potential loss of at least $600MM (USD) in combined e-commerce sales due to customers abandoning the homepage before it is downloaded on their mobile device.

"With the increase in smartphones and tablets, it's no surprise that more customers are using mobile devices for shopping. At the same time, many major e-commerce websites suffer from poor mobile web performance. We looked at the speed of the homepages alone but a typical customer moves through four to seven pages in their online shopping journey," said Igor Faletski, CEO of Mobify. "A slow loading website is a massive obstacle for mobile customers, especially when accessing content-heavy responsive pages. Mobify Performance Suite optimizes existing websites so customers experience fast mobile browsing and purchasing."

ADDITIONAL FINDINGS

• The average Top 100 Internet Retailer homepage downloads to a mobile device on a 3G network in 5.2 seconds. With Mobify Performance Suite, the average download time is 3.9 seconds. This is a 25% improvement.
• The average Top 100 Internet Retailer homepage weighs 588 kilobytes. With Mobify Performance Suite, the average homepage weight is reduced to 435 kilobytes. This is a 26% improvement.

HOW MOBIFY PERFORMANCE SUITE WORKS

Mobify Performance Suite is a set of three mobile performance optimization features that can be individually selected and activated through a subscription to Mobify Platform. Mobify Performance Suite corrects common mobile performance issues, such as slow page load time and excessive data usage, without requiring an overhaul of an existing website or the creation of a separate mobile site. Mobify Performance Suite is installed by embedding the Mobify JavaScript tag into the HTML code of the desktop or responsive site.

To find out how an e-commerce website currently performs on mobile and to see how Mobify Performance Suite can improve its performance, visit www.mobify.com.

About Mobify
Mobify (http://www.mobify.com) is an open platform for making any website adaptive to any device: smartphones, tablets and more. Developers use Mobify's API and tools based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build adaptive web experiences and to ensure fast, reliable mobile web performance running on Mobify Cloud. Mobify serves tens of millions of mobile visitors every month for e-commerce and publishing companies like Starbucks, Siemens, Expedia, Beyond the Rack and Condé Nast.

About the Methodology
Sites were accessed concurrently using a smartphone simulator, with and without Mobify Performance Suite features activated. Mobify modeled these results using independent research, revenue data supplied from the Internet Retailer Top 500 report and research published by KISSmetrics, mobile conversion rates from moz.com and Mary Meeker and Liang Wu's "2013 Internet Trends ." The model estimates time savings based on directly measured page size reduction using the Mobify Performance Suite and reduced number of connections over average 3G connection speeds and latency.

SOURCE Mobify