British m-commerce websites slower off the blocks than Germans

Post by Steven Cox on 6th October 2011
 in E-commerce, General news, Retail, Search

The Germans can still say they regularly beat the British at one thing – the speed of their mobile e-commerce websites.

Tests conducted by internet and cloud computing monitoring company Keynote Systems found the score was 3-2 in Germany's favour when it came to the best-performing mobile sales sites, when it checked out the leading players last month.

The best British performer was clothing and homewares company Next, but it could only achieve third spot, behind OTTO, a Teutonic mail order business, and German budget supermarket chain Aldi.

The other two top five performers were Amazon.de and Tesco.

The most reliable sites for loading on a mobile phone were Amazon Japan, followed closely by those of two Swedish retail giants, clothing retailer H&M, and furniture giant IKEA.

As retailers gear up for the Christmas rush, website speed and availability will be a key issue, Keynote Systems' lead solutions consultant Robert Castley told Retailgazette.co.uk: "This year more than ever, we’re going to see a huge number of consumers conducting their Christmas shopping on their mobiles – whether it’s for research, browsing, comparing prices or actually making purchases,” he said.

“However, if consumers have to wait for more than ten seconds for a mobile site home page to load, it’s unlikely they’ll have enough faith in the retailer to complete a transaction from their mobile phone.”

Retailers in seven countries – the UK, France, Germany, America, Japan, Sweden and Australia - were studied for the survey.